Meta AI
What the default settings do
Meta trains its generative AI models on public content from adult users across Facebook and Instagram: public posts, photos and their captions, and comments, alongside licensed data and public information from the open web. Private messages between you and friends or family are excluded from this unless you choose to share that content into a conversation with Meta AI yourself. Content from accounts belonging to people under 18 is also excluded.
Meta’s Privacy Policy also treats your direct interactions with its AI features as their own category of data. Prompts, questions, photos, and anything else you send to Meta AI are collected and used both to generate responses and, more recently, to personalize the content and ads you see elsewhere across Meta’s apps, though Meta states it excludes sensitive categories like religion, health, and political views from that ad-targeting use.
Whether you have a meaningful way to object depends heavily on where you live. Users in the EU, UK, and Switzerland have a legal right under data protection law to object to their public content being used for AI training, and this is not just a policy courtesy: Ireland’s Data Protection Commission pushed Meta to pause training on EU and UK users’ data in mid-2024 while regulators reviewed the practice, and Meta only resumed training in the region in 2025 after adjustments, including a more prominent objection process. Outside those regions, including in the United States, there is no equivalent legal right. Meta still provides an objection form globally, but honoring it is a matter of Meta’s discretion rather than a guaranteed entitlement the way it is in Europe.
The Meta AI assistant itself, whether inside Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, or the standalone Meta AI app, cannot be fully removed. Meta’s help documentation covers muting its presence in a chat thread or minimizing where it appears, but there is no setting that deletes the assistant from the apps entirely the way you might uninstall a separate app.
A reasonable privacy baseline
These settings are found in the Privacy Center, accessible from Settings & Privacy inside Facebook, Instagram, or the standalone Meta AI app.
Training opt-out
Settings & Privacy → Privacy Center → Privacy topics → AI at Meta → Submit an objection if applicable
This is the path to Meta's form for objecting to your public content being used to train its generative AI models. The form asks you to describe your concern and can include relevant context or examples. If you're in the EU, UK, or Switzerland, submitting this is backed by a legal right to have it honored. Elsewhere, Meta reviews these on a discretionary basis, so treat submission as a request rather than a guaranteed outcome.
Account audience settings for posts → Set sensitive content to Friends or narrower
Meta's stated policy scope for AI training is public content. Content that isn't public to begin with is a more reliable way to keep specific posts, photos, or captions out of the training pool than relying on the objection form, particularly outside regions where objecting is a legal right.
Meta AI in-app
Mute or hide the Meta AI chat thread → In Messenger, WhatsApp, or Instagram DMs where it appears
This is the practical limit of what's controllable: you can mute notifications from Meta AI and reduce where it surfaces in your chat list, but there is no toggle that removes it from the apps entirely.
Avoid sharing sensitive personal messages into a Meta AI conversation → Practical habit rather than a setting
Because Meta AI collects what you directly send it as a distinct category of data, treating conversations with the assistant with the same caution as a public post, rather than as private as a message to a friend, is the more realistic mental model.
Ad personalization from AI interactions
Settings & Privacy → Ad Preferences → review data sources used for ads → Adjust as available
Since Meta states it now draws on your interactions with its AI features to help personalize ads and content, reviewing your broader ad preferences settings is worth doing alongside the AI-specific objection above, since the two are related but separately managed.
Trade-offs
- Submitting the objection form outside the EU, UK, or Switzerland may simply not change anything, since Meta is not legally required to honor it there; it costs little to submit but shouldn’t be relied upon as a guarantee.
- Setting posts and photos to Friends-only or narrower reduces your presence in Meta’s training data, but it also limits the reach and visibility you may otherwise want for public content, such as a public profile used for professional purposes.
- Muting Meta AI reduces how much it intrudes on your daily use of the apps, but you lose quick access to it in the threads where it’s muted.
- Treating Meta AI conversations as semi-public means being more guarded in exactly the kind of casual, exploratory conversations the assistant is designed to invite.
- Adjusting ad preferences may reduce how relevant ads feel to you without reducing how many ads you see overall.
Who should not change these settings
- If you live outside the EU, UK, or Switzerland and have already decided the objection form isn’t worth the effort given it isn’t legally binding there, that’s a defensible read of the actual mechanics, not an oversight.
- If your account and posts are already public by design, such as a creator, business, or public figure account, keeping content public is likely central to why you use the platform, and narrowing audience settings would undercut that purpose.
- If you find Meta AI genuinely useful inside Messenger or WhatsApp threads, such as for quick questions without leaving the conversation, keeping it unmuted is a reasonable trade for that convenience.
- If you’re comfortable with your public content contributing to Meta’s AI development and don’t view it differently from the visibility you’ve already accepted by posting publicly, leaving the defaults as they are is a coherent position.