Online Privacy

Meta Changes AI Tool That Used Public Instagram Photos After Privacy Backlash Instagram users who post publicly may have noticed a brief controversy earlier this month. Meta had been running an AI tool that automatically scanned public Instagram images to train its models. After a wave of criticism from privacy advocates and users, the company announced it would pull back the feature. Here’s a breakdown of what happened, why it matters, and what you can do right now to protect your own photos. ...

Instagram Scraping Backlash: What Meta’s Policy Change Means for Your Photos Earlier this month, Meta launched an experimental AI tool that automatically collected public images from Instagram. Within days, the company faced a wave of criticism from users, privacy advocates, and regulators. By July 11, Meta announced it would scale back the tool and review its approach. ...

Meta Scales Back AI Tool That Used Public Instagram Photos After Privacy Backlash Meta has quietly limited an AI tool that was automatically collecting public Instagram photos, following criticism from users and privacy advocates who said the company was scraping images without meaningful consent. The change applies to future data collection, though it remains unclear whether images already gathered will continue to be used for AI training. ...

Meta Scales Back AI That Scraped Public Instagram Photos After Backlash Meta recently announced it is reining in a new AI tool that automatically accessed public Instagram photos—a move that followed a wave of criticism from privacy advocates and regulators. If you have an Instagram account, even a public one, the change could affect how your images are used. Here is what actually happened, what it means for your privacy, and a few practical steps you can take right now. ...

Meta Reins In AI Tool That Grabbed Your Public Instagram Photos: What You Should Do Now Over the weekend, news broke that Meta had quietly launched an AI tool that automatically scraped public Instagram images to train its generative models. After a swift privacy backlash, the company announced it would rein in the tool. For anyone who posts public photos on Instagram, this raises an obvious question: what can you do to keep your images out of future AI training sets? ...

New AI Features Got Privacy Questions? Here’s How to Check Every week it seems another app or platform announces a new AI-powered tool. Your search engine now writes summaries for you. Your photo editor can remove backgrounds in one click. Your email client suggests entire replies. These features can be useful, but they also raise a common question: what happens to your data when the AI processes it? ...

Worried About AI Privacy? Here’s How to Check Any New Feature A local news outlet recently asked readers whether a new AI feature raised privacy concerns for them. The poll, conducted by KMPH in Fresno, California, is small and not nationally representative, but it taps into a question that’s becoming harder to ignore: as more apps, devices, and websites integrate artificial intelligence, what data are they collecting, and who gets to see it? ...

Stop your browser from spying on you: 5 settings to change right now Your browser does more than load websites. By default, many popular browsers send data about your activity back to the company that made them—Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, or Apple. Telemetry, ad personalization, search suggestions, and predictive services all feed information to servers you may not even know exist. ...

Meta’s AI Training with Keystrokes: What It Means for Your Privacy Recent reports have revealed that Meta developed an internal tool to collect keystrokes, mouse clicks, and other user interactions for training its artificial intelligence models. After employees raised privacy and ethical concerns, the company scaled back the tool’s scope. For users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, this raises a straightforward question: what data is Meta collecting, and what can you do about it? Here’s a clear breakdown of what happened, why it matters, and what steps you can take to protect your privacy. ...

How to Use Brave’s New Container Tabs for Better Privacy and Less Clutter If you’ve ever logged into your personal email, then opened a work account in another tab, and later found targeted ads for office supplies mixed with weekend trip suggestions, you’ve experienced the downside of a single browsing session. Your browser treats all tabs as part of the same profile, sharing cookies, site data, and login states. Brave’s container tabs aim to fix that by letting you wall off different activities into isolated, color-coded sessions. Here’s how they work and why they matter. ...