"AI Contractors at Meta Could See Users' Personal Data, Including Selfies", 6 August 2025

Meta's AI training may have exposed your personal information to contract workers.

To fine-tune its AI models, Meta hires outside contractors to read conversations between users and its chatbot, which has one billion monthly active users as of May, according to the company. Now, some contractors are claiming to have viewed personal data while reading and reviewing exchanges.

Four contract workers hired through training companies Outlier and Alignerr told Business Insider that they repeatedly saw Meta AI chats that contained the user's name, phone number, email address, gender, hobbies, and personal details. The information was either included in the text of a conversation by a user, which Meta's privacy policy warns against, or it was given to contractors by Meta, which placed the personal data alongside chat histories.

One worker said that they saw personal information in more than half of the thousands of chats they reviewed per week. Two other workers claimed to have seen selfies that users from the U.S. and India sent to the chatbot...

..."We intentionally limit what personal information they see, and we have processes and guardrails in place instructing them how to handle any such information they may encounter," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider...