Enlarge (credit: Boris Zhitkov | Moment)

The European Center for Digital Rights, known as Noyb, has filed complaints in 11 European countries to halt Meta’s plan to start training vague new AI technologies on European Union-based Facebook and Instagram users’ personal posts and pictures.

Meta’s AI training data will also be collected from third parties and from using Meta’s generative AI features and interacting with pages, the company has said. Additionally, Meta plans to collect information about people who aren’t on Facebook or Instagram but are featured in users’ posts or photos. The only exception from AI training is made for private messages sent between “friends and family,” which will not be processed, Meta’s blog said, but private messages sent to businesses and Meta are fair game. And any data collected for AI training could be shared with third parties.

“Unlike the already problematic situation of companies using certain (public) data to train a specific AI system (e.g. a chatbot), Meta’s new privacy policy basically says that the company wants to take all public and non-public user data that it has collected since 2007 and use it for any undefined type of current and future ‘artificial intelligence technology,’” Noyb alleged in a press release.