Before AI Exploits Our Chats, Let’s Learn from Social Media Mistakes
Meta is reportedly preparing to use data from generative AI interactions to target ads on Facebook and Instagram. It’s hard not to feel the déjà vu. In the 2010s, we slowly realized that our vacation photos, likes, and posts were not just “shared with friends” but the raw material of a surveillance economy. The Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal was the breaking point.
The outrage that followed changed laws and norms. Many privacy-conscious social media users learned to read privacy policies, switch to encrypted messengers, and ask how “free” products made their money. And yet, a decade later, many of us are having far more personal exchanges with generative AI systems than we ever had on Facebook or Instagram, without asking any of those same questions. If these interactions are folded into targeted advertising, then intimacy itself becomes the new frontier of surveillance and monetization.
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