📅 Since May 27, it’s official: your public Facebook posts, Instagram comments, and publicly accessible photos are now being used to train its artificial intelligence systems—without your explicit consent.
And yet… Meta considers it perfectly legal.
🎯 Their legal basis? Legitimate interest (Art. 6.1.f GDPR).
Meta relies on a 2024 Belgian decision, where the Belgian Data Protection Authority approved the training of a banking algorithm model on this basis, ruling that:
✅ The commercial interest was deemed legitimate;
✅ The processing was necessary;
✅ The data was anonymized during training.
🔍 But the real question lies elsewhere: Could users reasonably expect this? Was the information sufficiently transparent?
So, are we dealing with true transparency… or algorithmic opacity?
🧱 And what about the right to object?
It exists… in theory, because even though Meta technically offers an opt-out, it’s incredibly hard to find (I’ve experienced it myself) This is a “façade strategy” that could very well become its legal Achilles’ heel.
Because without a real and informed opt-out, the balance of interests inevitably shifts in favor of users.
This Meta case might well become a textbook example of how public data is leveraged by AI.
European data protection authorities are watching, analyzing—and their upcoming decisions will shape the legal framework of tomorrow.
👉 Defend transparency
or
👉 Adapt to programmed invisibility.
