Meta has just announced a controversial new step in its artificial intelligence earning strategy. The company said it will start using data collected from user conversations with AI products to serve targeted advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
According to Meta, the security policy will be updated before December 16, applied globally except for South Korea, the UK and the European Union, which are all places where strict data privacy laws do not allow this form of collection.
Users will be notified of the changes in the coming days, and especially there will be no way to refuse.
For many years, Meta's core operations have relied on building detailed Facebook and Instagram user profiles to sell over-targeted ads to advertisers.
This time, data from AI conversations will add a new stream of information, giving Meta more powerful signals to optimize advertising. With more than a billion people chatting with Meta AI every month, the data the company holds is extremely rich.
For example, if users are chatting about their long-distance walking preferences, Meta can display ads about shoes or climbing devices.
Not only stopping at Meta AI, this change also includes other AI services, such as Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which collect voice, image, video data or Vives video data feed and AI Imagine photo creation tool.
Meta representative affirmed that sensitive data such as religion, politics, health, sexual orientation, race origin, philosophical views or union membership status will not be exploited to display advertisements.
However, many experts believe that deeply integrating AI data into Meta's huge advertising system continues to pose major concerns about privacy.
Christy Harris, Meta's security policy director, said the company is still building a system to take advantage of AI interaction, while emphasizing that this is a way to improve the value of advertising products.
However, Meta currently has no plans to directly include advertising in the AI interface, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has left this possibility open in the future.
The trend of making money from AI is also spreading in the technology world. Earlier this week, OpenAI announced the feature of direct shopping in ChatGPT, thereby receiving commissions from transactions.
Previously, Google revealed that it will integrate advertising into AI Mode search mode. For Meta, the move to leverage AI chat data to optimize advertising is seen as an important preparation for a stronger phase of AI-based business.
