This Privacy Hoax Even Has Celebs Fooled. Here’s How To Make Sure You Don’t Fall For It.

If you’re on Instagram right now, you might be seeing a dire message being shared about artificial intelligence features from Meta Platforms, Instagram’s parent company. These include a chatbot that will answer your questions in a search bar, as well as services that can create digital stickers and edit photos.

And based on the popularity of the “Goodbye Meta AI” message on Instagram, people are not having it.

So far, this “Goodbye Meta AI” legal notice has been shared hundreds of thousands of times by not just typical social media users, but also musicians, actors and athletes like James McAvoy, Julianne Moore and Tom Brady, because Instagram’s “Add yours” sticker makes sharing the message as easy as a click. Perhaps even your friends or family members have put it on their accounts, too.

“Goodbye Meta AI. Please note an attorney has advised us to put this on, failure to do so may result in legal consequences,” the warning reads in part. “If you do not post at least once it will be assumed you are okay with them using your information and photos. I do not give Meta or anyone else permission to use any of my personal data, profile information or photos.”

But here’s the thing: Stating that Meta does not have your permission to use your data to train its AI has no legal standing.

Meta says it uses public Instagram and Facebook posts to train its generative AI models.

Your past posts may have already been used as part of this training. During an Australian Senate inquiry with Meta’s global privacy director, the company acknowledged that public posts from adults on Instagram or Facebook since 2007 had been used to train its AI.

And, no, a disclaimer posted to your Instagram story is not going to stop that from happening.

“Simply posting something isn’t going to work because you’ve already agreed to it by creating your account in the first place,” said Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media technology at The University of Alabama.

If you use a Meta service like Instagram, you agree to give Meta “a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content,” according to the company’s terms of use.

Once you log on or create an account with a social media service, “you’ve entered into a contract based on their terms of service, based on their privacy policies, and so attempting to modify that unilaterally won’t work,” said Jasmine McNealy, an associate professor in media production, management and technology at the University of Florida.

Messages like “Goodbye Meta AI” are just the latest versions of copy-pasted chain emails of yore. Back in the ’90s, these emails would guilt-trip you into sharing their messages with threats like “Send this to 10 people or you’ll have bad luck for 10 years,” Maddox said.

“When there are moments of uncertainty and these things start to go viral, I think there’s a question of ‘Well, clearly other people are doing it. Maybe there’s some weight behind it,’” she said.

Your copy-pasted legal notice is not going to work, but the AI anxiety that prompts so many people to share these messages is real. As Meta builds its AI systems, people are worried about having their data used to train its technology without their consent.

Following regulatory backlash that paused its AI initiative in the U.K., Meta said weeks ago that it would again start to use public content shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram “over the coming months.”

“More people are understanding how platforms and apps can use the content that they create in ways that they have no control over,” McNealy said. “And they’re at minimum uncomfortable with it.”

But ultimately it’s going to take more than a reposted notice to protect your data from being used by a company’s AI training model. Making your posts more private may help limit how they are used, because Meta says it only uses publicly shared photos and text from Instagram and Facebook for its AI training.

You also have the right to object to how your information is used for AI at Meta. The company provides a form for you to request to delete any personal information that might have been used for building and improving its AI, but you will also be asked to provide proof that your personal information appeared in a response from an AI model at Meta. The company says it will not “automatically fulfill requests sent using this form. We review them consistent with your local laws.”

As Maddox explained, people in the U.S. have to work harder to opt out of AI features, while people in the European Union have more protections under their governments’ stricter information privacy laws.

“It shouldn’t be on the users,” Maddox said. “Platforms should be much more transparent. And one day, I hope to see the U.S. pass something similar to the European Union’s GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], which would put the onus on platforms instead of on users.”