The privacy concerns about Meta AI
Users may unintentionally share their conversations on Meta's public feed
If you use the Meta AI app, you should know that your conversations can be shared publicly. Some users are unaware of this, and they are sharing all types of personal information that they likely wanted to keep private.
Katie Notopoulos is a Senior Correspondent at Business Insider, covering technology and culture. She has written about the public nature of the Meta AI app’s conversations multiple times, initially back on 2025-05-01:
To be clear, your AI chats are not public by default — you have to choose to share them individually by tapping a share button.
Even so, I get the sense that some people don't really understand what they're sharing, or what's going on.
Now, the conversations are becoming quite revealing. As she reported on 2025-06-01, Meta AI’s users are sharing their
…thoughts on grief, or child custody, or financial distress. And it seems like some people aren't aware that what they're sharing will end up on a public feed.
Justine Moore is a Partner at the Andreesen Horowitz (commonly called a16z), a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. She spent an hour browsing the app and shared what she found on Twitter; the results are quite disturbing.
Pieter Arntz of Malwarebytes Labs wrote some useful guidelines to keep your conversations with Meta AI private. I encourage you to read that article in detail and follow those steps to protect your privacy.
Mozilla has begun a petition about this issue. It asks Meta to do the following:
Add clear visual indicators to make it unmistakable when a prompt and response are being made public.
Clarify sharing through better text prompts and a revised user experience, including at the moment of sharing and anywhere shared content appears. The goal is education and awareness, not just consent buried in unclear buttons.
Use familiar platform conventions, like the standard phone share sheet, to ensure users understand they’re posting to a public space.
Notify users who have shared content publicly, and provide details about how they can permanently delete any unintentionally shared content.
These suggestions sound reasonable, beneficial, and practical. I hope that Meta will consider them seriously.