Facebook, owned by social media group Meta, has recently begun popping up notifications in the U.S. and Canadian markets, asking users to grant permission to access their entire mobile photo albums. Even if these photos are not posted to Facebook, they will be automatically uploaded to the server.
This feature is called cloud processing, and if the user agrees to authorize it, Facebook will grab all of the user's photos and automatically identify, process and generate AI-processed versions to create video memories, anniversary stories and more.
Although Facebook promises that grabbing these photos will not be used for advertising purposes, nor will it be used to push ads by identifying the location, content, and time of the photos, if users agree, they must grant Meta AI terms of service, which have more pitfalls.
According to the terms of service, the user's agreement to this term means that the user grants Meta AI to analyze the content and facial features in the photo, and Meta also has the right to use the people or other objects in the photo for free to produce Meta's own creative content.
Of course, this clause also stipulates that Meta can use user photos to provide the ability to generate new content such as images. This is actually using user photos to train AI models. That is, even if users do not post their photos to Facebook, they will be used to train the AI model.
For Meta, its huge user base is a valuable asset. It can not only be used to sell advertisements, but also use user data to train AI models. For example, text and pictures posted by users will be used to train AI. Photos that are not published now can also be used to train AI. In the AI era, these data sets are gold mines to be mined.
It is easy to click Allow after receiving the notification, but it is more troublesome for users to exit this cloud processing function. After some exploration, some users found that there is an option to share albums in the privacy of Facebook settings, and they can only exit by turning off this option.
Of course, according to the current practice in the Internet industry, any button that pops up and is marked with a brighter color needs to be clicked with caution, because you will be tricked if you are not careful, so be careful to grant permissions to various apps to read the entire album.