In an update that"s rolling out globally (except in a handful of countries), Meta will use your data from outside businesses to personalize your AI responses and your primary feeds.
Meta already utilizes your shopping activity to target ads, but the company now plans to expand this tracking to personalize other "parts of your experience" like feed algorithms and AI assistant chats.
The company is replacing the two settings ("Your activity off Meta technologies" and "Activity from other businesses") that currently let you disconnect off-platform activity with a single, renamed setting called Activity from other businesses.
If you don"t want Meta to manipulate your feed and AI responses using your outside history, you can just turn the Activity from other businesses setting off in your account settings. This toggle resides within your Accounts Center, applying your choice to every connected profile. Turning this off will not stop companies from sending your data to Meta. The company will still collect your web interactions, but it only uses them to train products, while still accessing external accounts you connect.
When The Verge spoke to Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez, the representative said that this update will exclude several locations at launch, including the European region, the UK, Brazil, Thailand, South Africa, Turkey, South Korea, Ecuador, Nigeria, and Kenya.
The new update comes at a time when the social media giant is recovering from a major PR disaster involving generative AI. Last week, there was a huge security issue on Instagram where attackers figured out a way to trick Meta AI into handing over account ownership (even if the victim had 2FA enabled). Some of the affected accounts include the dormant Obama White House profile, cosmetics brand Sephora, the Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force, and security researcher Jane Manchun Wong.
Internally, the company also had to scale back plans on its Model Capability Initiative (MCI), an employee-monitoring program designed to train corporate AI models by recording worker keystrokes and screen activity, after employees raised privacy concerns and complained about severe battery life drain.