Report: Meta’s AI app “memory” raises privacy concerns
Most people who spend a lot of time on the web might realize they should be careful about what they search for.
Your browser saves your history of what sites you’ve searched for and visited, and the pervasive ad tech on those sites tracks you across the web.
But what about the chatbots you converse with daily? How easy is it to limit or remove your sensitive queries from your AI’s “memory”?
That’s the question that The Washington Post asked when it tested out Meta’s new AI app. The testing found that it wasn’t easy to purge sensitive information from Meta AI’s chat history compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini app.
Meta recently announced that “almost a billion” monthly active users are using Meta AI across its family of apps, which means ads will be coming soon. And despite Meta’s assertion that it will try to not add sensitive topics to its “memory file,” columnist Geoffrey Fowler found that it had. He wrote:
“Meta says it tries not to add sensitive topics to your Memory file, but my tests found it recorded plenty — like fertility and payday loans. What’s worse, the Meta AI app does not give you the ability to prevent it from saving chats or memories. (The closest you can get is to use the Meta AI website without logging in.) Nor does Meta AI offer a ‘temporary’ mode, as ChatGPT does, that keeps a conversation out of your history.”
Fowler also said the risk is not just that you might get shown ads for topics you chat with your AI about, but that your queries could be used to train their AI systems going forward.
That’s the question that The Washington Post asked when it tested out Meta’s new AI app. The testing found that it wasn’t easy to purge sensitive information from Meta AI’s chat history compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini app.
Meta recently announced that “almost a billion” monthly active users are using Meta AI across its family of apps, which means ads will be coming soon. And despite Meta’s assertion that it will try to not add sensitive topics to its “memory file,” columnist Geoffrey Fowler found that it had. He wrote:
“Meta says it tries not to add sensitive topics to your Memory file, but my tests found it recorded plenty — like fertility and payday loans. What’s worse, the Meta AI app does not give you the ability to prevent it from saving chats or memories. (The closest you can get is to use the Meta AI website without logging in.) Nor does Meta AI offer a ‘temporary’ mode, as ChatGPT does, that keeps a conversation out of your history.”
Fowler also said the risk is not just that you might get shown ads for topics you chat with your AI about, but that your queries could be used to train their AI systems going forward.
