Meta to Scrape Your AI Chats for Ads, No Opt-Out Available Hold onto your digital hats, because the line between private conversation and advertising data is about to get even blurrier. Meta has announced it will soon begin scraping user conversations with its AI chatbots to fuel its massive ad-targeting machine. The new policy is set to take effect on December 16. The company will start alerting users about the change through in-app notifications and emails beginning October 7. This move will roll out to most regions globally, with notable exceptions being the European Union and South Korea, at least for the initial launch. So, what does this look like in practice? Meta gives a straightforward example. If you are chatting with an AI chatbot about your interest in hiking, that conversation will be used to personalize the content and ads you see across platforms like Facebook and Instagram. You might suddenly find your feed filled with recommendations for hiking groups, posts from friends about local trails, and, of course, ads for hiking boots. A Meta privacy policy manager explained that these AI interactions will become another input that informs how your social media feeds and advertisements are personalized. This is fundamentally the same behavioral ad targeting that has tracked our clicks and browsing history for decades. The significant shift is that one-on-one conversations, which have traditionally been considered more private, are now being explicitly included as a data source. This serves as a stark reminder that AI chatbots are corporate products, not confidential companions. There is no way to opt out of this data scraping. According to reports, if you choose to interact with a Meta chatbot, your conversations will be subject to this policy. Meta does state that its systems are designed to avoid scraping data related to sensitive topics. The company listed categories such as religious views, sexual orientation, political views, health, racial or ethnic origin, philosophical beliefs, and trade union membership as being off-limits for this ad-targeting program. However, the very existence of this policy will likely cause many users to think twice about what they share with an AI, regardless of any promised safeguards. The era of assuming your casual chat with a bot is private is officially over at Meta.
