As Meta, the company behind Facebook, continues to develop its generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, you can request deletion of some of the personal data the company uses to train its AI models. However, this requires a lot of clarification.

Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, announced plans to bring a number of AI features to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Although generative AI is very popular in Silicon Valley, there are still unclear legal questions surrounding the technology and many people are concerned about its rapid progress.

Do you want to prevent Meta from using all your information to improve its artificial intelligence? The company added a new form to one of their help centers, entitled “Rights of interested parties in generative AI” From Facebook. With this request, Meta may be asked to give you access to the third-party data it uses for AI development and delete personal information. The key word here is “request.” The company does not guarantee that it will delete them or provide them to you, even if they are yours.

Delete your personal data from Facebook AI

It’s important to note that this form does not address the vast amount of personal data that Meta has collected about you on its platform; This only applies to external data that the company will aggregate to power its generative AI, which may include data found elsewhere on the internet, as well as some obtained from intermediaries or third-party services.

You do not need to be logged in to your Facebook account to submit an opt-out request. All the social network needs is your country of residence, your full name and email address. In my experience, the website is quite buggy on the phone and I find it easier to fill out the form on my computer. It took more than 24 hours for the company to send a email basic confirmation indicating that he is “reviewing [mi] application”.

For those living in the United States, it is unclear if anything happens when you fill out this form. Data privacy laws protecting UK residents make this quiz even more useful for those based there. “Depending on where people live, they will be able to exercise their data subject rights and choose not to use certain data to train our AI models,” Meta spokesperson Thomas Richards told Gizmodo. Meta did not respond to our multiple requests for comment for this story.

A post on the company blog about Meta’s use of personal information to train its artificial intelligence further discusses different approaches to collecting personal data, but details are limited: “in Europe and the UK, we rely on legitimate interests to collect and process any personal information included in this public data. available and licensed resources for training our generative AI models. In other jurisdictions where applicable, we rely on appropriate legal bases to collect and process this data.”

The opt-out form comes just months after European regulators fined Meta $1.3 billion for misusing data from the UK.

Article originally published in CABLE. Adapted by Andrei Osornio.