European residents using Meta products have until May 26 to opt out of the US company using their personal data to train its AI system. Here are the steps you can take:
Anyone who uses Meta products in Europe, such as Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, has until May 26 to enforce privacy rights which prevent the US company from using their personal data to train its AI system. The company will begin using users' personal data to train Meta AI on May 27.
Personal data which the company will use to train AI includes your name, usernames, profile pictures, activity in public groups, pages or channels, public comments or reviews on Facebook Marketplace or a public Instagram account and avatars.
Any posts, including photos, videos, captions, stories, or reels, which are on a public profile can also be used to train Meta’s AI system.
Meta - and other similar companies - gather vast amounts of information about our public and personal lives, how we behave online, what we share, how we share it and also what we choose to keep private.
This information is highly valuable. Meta - and other similar companies - use this information to personalise techniques which keep us using their products for as long as possible and sell this personal information to third parties.
This online economy also impacts our offline lives, leaving users vulnerable to social media addiction, social isolation, compulsive spending and poor mental health - particularly among young people.
How Metas' algorithms work is not public information, and the company is not clear about how the data it has access to will be used or sold in the future.
In the following BBC video, Aral Balkan of the Small Technology Foundation explains more:
Meta has published a form which users can complete to opt out of the company using their personal data to train AI. You must be logged in to your Meta accounts in order to fill out the form.
You will need to give an email address to which Meta can send a confirmation that you have opted out, but this doesn’t need to be the same email address with which your Meta account is connected.
You will then be prompted to give a reason why you are opting out of Meta using your personal data to train AI, but it isn’t obligatory to give an explanation.
If you have multiple accounts which are linked, for example, two Instagram accounts, you can opt out via one account, and your decision will apply to both accounts.
WhatsApp is also a Meta product. However, since WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, information shared in WhatsApp conversations cannot be used to train Meta AI, even after May 26, 2025.
But there is an exception to this rule. As soon as you communicate with the Meta AI feature in WhatsApp or integrate it into a group chat, these parts of the communication with Meta AI are no longer encrypted and are made available to the company.
“[In WhatsApp] only information which you write to the “Meta AI” can be used for training purposes. But if you don’t write anything in the chat with the blue circle, it won’t have access to data, as far as we know,” the German Consumer Advice Centre explains.
For this reason, WhatsApp users do not need to opt out by May 26, they should just know that any information they share directly with the integrated AI feature can be used to train AI.
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