Meta Wants Facebook AI To View All The Photos In Your Camera Roll

Meta announced a new AI feature that Facebook users can take advantage of to streamline the process of sharing photos and videos on the social network. The company wants Facebook users to agree to upload their camera rolls on an ongoing basis to Meta's servers, where the AI will suggest content to share on Facebook, along with proposing edits to make the content stand out. The feature is opt-in, as Facebook points out in a blog post, and it's available in the U.S. and Canada. It builds on an AI initiative Meta announced in June, when Facebook rolled out prompts to users in certain regions asking them for permission to upload their photos to Meta's servers for "cloud processing" features that would help them find and improve content for sharing on its social networks. Later, some Facebook users found that Meta might be scanning their photo libraries without them knowing.

Meta

The newly announced feature is problematic, as Meta wants users to agree to let its AI analyze all the images in the camera roll. "With your permission and the help of AI, our new feature enables Facebook to automatically surface hidden gems – those memorable moments that get lost among screenshots, receipts, and random snaps – and edit them to save or share," Meta said. The prompt has some good news, though. If you enable the feature, the information in your camera roll won't be used for ad targeting. Meta says it will check the content for "safety and integrity purposes."

Meta is marketing the new feature as a useful addition to Facebook that's meant to help people find and enhance shareworthy content. "This new feature enhances your best photos, offers creative edits to make your content stand out, and creates fun collages and videos to help you connect with the friends and family you choose to share with," Meta said, adding that "no design skills [are] required – this feature does the heavy lifting, so you can focus on sharing the fun. All suggestions are private to you, and you decide what to share, when to share, and with whom." Meta then says it won't use media from the camera roll to improve Meta AI "unless you choose to edit this media with our AI tools, or share."

However, if you use the feature to let Meta AI recommend what to share and how to edit the content, you'll probably want to share the resulting AI-enhanced creations with your followers. In this instance, Meta AI will train on those photos. If you end up permitting access to your media, it's important to remember that Facebook can access everything in your camera roll, including sensitive content that you may not want to share. Think of information you might have stored in screenshots, like passwords and other private data. You can turn off the feature after enabling it, but it's unclear whether you can delete your photos already uploaded to Meta AI servers. Meta told The Verge in June that Meta AI might hold on to some of the data for longer than 30 days.