(Credit: Sebastian Kahnert/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Update (6/17): Amid concern from privacy advocates and social media users, Meta has updated its Meta AI app to show a warning prompt before sharing any chats to the public Discover feed.
Previously, when users tapped Share > Post in a chat, the conversation was added to the public feed without any warning, which resulted in users accidentally making their personal information public. Now, a pop-up will say, "Prompts you post are public and visible to everyone. Your prompts may be suggested by Meta on other Meta apps. Avoid sharing personal or sensitive information."
(Credit: Jibin Joseph/PCMag)Original Story (6/13):
If you have been active on Meta AI’s new dedicated app, you need to be careful.
The standalone Meta AI mobile app launched in April, and like Gemini and ChatGPT, it can answer your questions and generate images. However, the app has a surprise inclusion: a Discover tab that shows you what others have been up to.
The feed on the Discover tab isn’t auto-generated. Once the AI chatbot generates a response, a user has to hit Share > Post to publish their interaction on Discover. Unfortunately, many users have been using this function without understanding its full implications.
“The feed is almost entirely boomers who seem to have no idea their conversations with the chatbot are posted publicly,” says tech investor Justine Moore, who discovered and shared a few of the conversations. Some of the posts include personal information, such as medical records, tax records, home addresses, and confessions of affairs.
To stop yourself from making your conversations public, avoid using the Share button at the top right of a chat window. Unlike on other apps, the Share button here doesn’t mean you’ll be sharing stuff with your friends or known contacts; it goes out to a feed on the Meta AI app, which you can scroll like you would the traditional Facebook News Feed.
I installed the Meta AI app for the first time today, and there were no instructions regarding the Share option. The subsequent page has a Post button, and it doesn’t indicate where the post will be published, either. It’s only after you hit Post that you realize the chat has been added to Discover. Meta certainly needs to improve in this area.
(Credit: Meta/PCMag)If you accidentally shared a chat publicly, you can delete it by tapping the three-dot menu at the top right of the post. However, if you posted too many, you need to make all your public prompts visible only to you and, if necessary, delete all prompts.
To do that, tap your profile icon at the top right of the app interface, head to Data & Privacy > Manage your information > Make all public prompts visible to only you, and select Delete all prompts to remove your posts from the Discover feed and personal history.
Business Insider reached out to about two dozen people who had made their posts public; only one responded, and he said he hadn't meant to post it to his feed. The post was nothing scandalous, at least.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though it noted to BI the steps involved in making an AI discussion public.