The Cybersecurity Threat to FB & Insta Users

Europe has much stronger privacy laws (the GDPR) than the United States, and some global companies simply follow the more stringent GDPR guidelines across their services to keep things simple, which extends those protections to the US users.

Not Meta, the company behind Facebook (FB) and Instagram (Insta).

In Europe, Meta alerted users that its artificial intelligence (AI) would begin scraping (ingesting) users’ public posts for AI training data as of June 26. This announcement has caused a kerfuffle around security and user privacy issues.

No kerfuffle here in the States, not because our data won’t be ingested, but because Meta already ingests US users’ public posts for training data (text, photos, and prompts) for Meta AI, its chatbot.  Didn’t realize Meta was using your FB or Insta posts to train its AI? If you are a US user, that’s because Meta was not required to inform you it was doing so. No GDPR here!

I think this surprises no one and, if you have your posts set to public, you likely had no misguided belief that your data were private. Even so, tracking how companies use your data–your words, your photos–in is a good habit to get into for one major security reason.

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