Social Media Platforms Are Training Their AI Models on Your Content, but You Can Stop Them (Sometimes)

Recently, the Amazon-owned Twitch made headlines for announcing that it would allow users to opt out of having their streams, VODs, and chats fed into an AI training machine. This, understandably, made a lot of people upset. But, it turns out, Twitch might be one of the more moderate social media sites on this front. Most social media apps are training some kind of AI on your data, and few make it as easy as a single toggle to opt out at all.

Almost every social media site out there makes it extremely hard to know exactly how your data is used these days. Training generative AI models like Google’s Gemini are often lumped in with more mundane (but still machine learning-powered) features like, say, YouTube’s algorithm. Sifting through privacy policies to even find out whether a social app contributes to the kind of generative AI that’s proven so controversial is an undertaking that would deter most lawyers.

Even if you find out how your data’s being used, many sites simply don’t offer you the ability to opt out. And of all the ones I looked at, not a single one that trains AI offers an opt-in model. Put simply, if you logged on today, tech companies took that as your consent to be part of their training data. If there is a way to opt out of even some AI training from a social media site, though, you’ll find instructions in our list below, sorted by alphabetical order.

What training do they do? Officially, Bluesky doesn't train any AI models—although it does employ AI in its development and builds AI features. However, since Bluesky uses the decentralized AT Protocol, your posts (and a lot of other data, like who you block) are public. So it’s possible for just about anyone to scrape your posts and use them to train AI.

What can you do to stop it? You don’t need to do anything; Bluesky itself doesn’t use your posts to train AI. However, if you’re worried about a third party scraping your data, you might want to hold off on posting to it.

What training do they do? It might be easier to ask what data Facebook doesn’t use for training AI. After spending a small country’s GDP worth of money on a metaverse that never materialized, Facebook’s parent company Meta is pivoting to AI and rushing to catch up to companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the process. The company’s policy on training AI with your data is extremely broad, not only encompassing your posts, photos, and interactions on Facebook, but also data collected from third-party brokers, and “information that is available on the internet.” That's a phrase so all-encompassing that it’s hard to imagine any data Facebook is technically capable of scooping up that it would refrain from collecting. Facebook says it stops just short of training AI on private messages with friends or family, “unless you or someone in the chat chooses to share those messages with our AIs.”

What can you do to stop it? Unfortunately, unless you’re in the EU, Facebook makes it impossible to opt out of training AI with your data. The company carves out a narrow exception (where it is obligated to by law) for the specific scenario where you find personally identifying information about you included in a response from one of its AI tools. If that happens, you can submit a complaint, which Facebook will then review to decide if it will do anything about it.

However, keep in mind that Meta considers interacting with Facebook’s AI tools in the first place as consent to train future AI models on your interactions with it. So, even trying to figure out whether your personal information has been scooped up at all could expose you further. In general, it seems the only winning move with Facebook is not to play. Though it’s worth noting that even deleting your Facebook account won’t necessarily stop Facebook from training AI with your data—it will just prevent them from getting any data from your Facebook account directly.

What training do they do? Instagram is owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta, so many of its policies are the same as what we covered for Facebook in the section above. That said, Instagram has some specific issues of its own, such as the Muse feature, which briefly let users create AI-generated images of other users without their consent, before immediately removing that feature after realizing it was a terrible, horrible idea.

What can you do to stop it? Similar to Facebook, you can file an objection if you find your private info included in AI responses, and if you’re in the EU, you can opt out of training entirely. Alternatively, your only real option is to either delete your Instagram account or at least make it private.

What training do they do? LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft famously is all-in on AI (for "entertainment purposes only"), so you should be wary about the site using your data to train AI. According to LinkedIn’s official policy, users’ posts, comments, profile data, resumes, and group activity, among other types of data, can all be used to train AI models. Unofficially, it should be noted that last year LinkedIn was sued over allegations that it was training AI on private DMs±an allegation LinkedIn denies.

What can you do to stop it? While LinkedIn uses the same “better to ask forgiveness than permission” model most companies employ, the site at least allows you to revoke your permission. On the site, head to Settings and Privacy > Data Privacy > How LinkedIn uses your data > Data for Generative AI Improvement. Here, you’ll find a toggle that’s on by default labeled “Use my data for training content creation AI models.” Switch this off. Note: This only applies to data collected on LinkedIn, not the broader Microsoft ecosystem.

What training do they do? Reddit is complicated: The company doesn’t train its own AI models, but it does have deals with both OpenAI and Google to train their models on its data. Reportedly, Reddit has at least considered ending those deals (at least in part because, like everyone else, the company has seen a drop in traffic as AI eats search’s lunch). But AI models were also training on Reddit data long before these deals were official, so it’s hard to say whether ending an official partnership would prevent AI companies from scooping up as much publicly-available data as possible.

What can you do to stop it? Short of deleting your Reddit account and never posting on the site, there’s nothing you can do. Reddit doesn’t have any tool to opt out of AI training at the moment. And even if it did, AI companies have been scraping publicly available posts for a while anyway.

What training do they do? Like most social media apps, Snapchat uses your public images, video, and audio to train its generative AI models. The company says it uses these to develop features like AI Snaps and AI Lenses. Snapchat also briefly had a deal to integrate Perplexity’s AI tools to its search, although that deal was “amicably ended” last year before a broad rollout, so it’s unclear if any user data was ever shared or trained with Perplexity.

Source: Read the original article on lifehacker.com