The latest step by Facebook is to request users permission to their camera roll so that it can give AI-powered suggestions on photos that they have not posted yet. It is the next step in the journey of social media companies in harnessing artificial intelligence to be a part of users’ daily life. It has this feature, which is visible when the user attempts to make a new Story, issuing a pop-up with creative add-ons such as collages, recaps, and AI re-stylings. The selling point is that it is easy at first glance to have Facebook examine your photos and put them on their server, and you are able to get exclusive, AI-generated ideas of what to write about.
This would mean that users are allowing Facebook to access images that they have already posted but are also letting them access the images sitting privately on their camera roll. It translates to the fact that even pictures you might never want to share can be analyzed by an AI of Facebook based on time, place, faces and objects in every photo. Facebook promises to store the data so that the user exclusively views it and cannot be used as an ad targeting tactic. The fact is that the user already agreed to Meta AI Terms of Service, which means the processing of your media and facial features is stored in the Meta servers.
The development brings up key issues of privacy and user consent. A large number of individuals are granted no clue about what they are approving when they press the Allow. Facilitating access to a deeper net of personal data with the convenience of AI-generated creativity, the boundary between what is conceived as helpful and what is overstepping becomes more complex.
Moving into the future, it would very likely result in the same trend because Meta and other firms are competing to create more intelligent AI programs. Being allowed to access even more personal data, specifically unshared photos, creates a great advantage for Meta in training their AI models and creating new features that would keep them active. However, this implies that the user will be more cautious of what they share and how their data is utilized. Since AI is getting more grounded in social media, understanding clear communication and real consent is going to become increasingly essential.
Facebook is asking users for access to their phone’s camera roll to automatically suggest AI-edited versions of their photos, including ones that haven’t been uploaded to Facebook yet.