Facebook is asking users for access to their phone’s camera roll to automatically suggest AI-edited versions of their photos — including ones that haven’t been uploaded to Facebook yet.
The feature is being suggested to Facebook users when they’re creating a new Story on the social networking app. Here, a screen pops up and asks if the user will opt into “cloud processing” to allow creative suggestions.
As the pop-up message explains, by clicking “Allow,” you’ll let Facebook generate new ideas from your camera roll, like collages, recaps, AI restylings, or photo themes. To work, Facebook says it will upload media from your camera roll to its cloud (meaning its servers) on an “ongoing basis,” based on information like time, location, or themes.
The message also notes that only you can see the suggestions, and the media isn’t used for ad targeting.
However, by tapping “Allow,” you are agreeing to Meta’s AI Terms. This allows your media and facial features to be analyzed by AI, it says. The company will additionally use the date and presence of people or objects in your photos to craft its creative ideas.
The creative tool is another example of the slippery slope that comes with sharing our personal media with AI providers. Like other tech giants, Meta has grand AI ambitions. Being able to tap into the personal photos users haven’t yet shared on Facebook’s social network could give the company an advantage in the AI race.
Unfortunately for end users, in tech companies’ rush to stay ahead, it’s not always clear what they’re agreeing to when features like this appear.
According to Meta’s AI Terms around image processing, “once shared, you agree that Meta will analyze those images, including facial features, using AI. This processing allows us to offer innovative new features, including the ability to summarize image contents, modify images, and generate new content based on the image,” the text states.
The same AI terms also give Meta’s AIs the right to “retain and use” any personal information you’ve shared in order to personalize its AI outputs. The company notes that it can review your interactions with its AIs, including conversations, and those reviews may be conducted by humans. The terms don’t define what Meta considers personal information, beyond saying it includes “information you submit as Prompts, Feedback, or other Content.”
We have to wonder whether the photos you’ve shared for “cloud processing” also count here.
Meta has not responded to our requests for comment or clarification.
So far, there hasn’t been much backlash about this feature. A handful of Facebook users have stumbled across the AI-generated photo suggestions when creating a new story and raised questions about it. For instance, one user on Reddit found that Facebook had pulled up an old photo (in this case, one that had previously been shared to the social network) and automatically turned it into an anime using Meta AI.
When another user in an anti-AI Facebook group asked for help shutting this feature off, the search led to a section called camera roll sharing suggestions in the app’s Settings.
We also found this feature under Facebook’s Settings, where it’s listed in the Preferences section.
On the “Camera roll sharing suggestions” page, there are two toggles. The first lets Facebook suggest photos from your camera roll when browsing the app. The second (which should be opt-in based on the pop-up that requested permission in Stories) is where you could enable or disable the “cloud processing,” which lets Meta make AI images using your camera roll photos.
This additional access to use AI on your camera roll’s photos does not appear to be new.
We found posts from earlier this year where confused Facebook users were sharing screenshots of the pop-up message that appeared in their Stories section. Meta has also published complete Help Documentation about the feature for both iOS and Android users.
Meta’s AI terms have been enforceable as of June 23, 2024; we can’t compare the current AI terms with older versions because Meta doesn’t keep a record, and previously published terms haven’t been properly saved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Since this feature dips into your camera roll, however, it extends beyond what Meta had previously announced, in terms of training its AIs on your publicly shared data, including posts and comments on Facebook and Instagram. (EU users had until May 27, 2025 to opt out.)