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5 min read
Quick Reality Check
Your phone apps are quietly scanning your private photos and data to train AI, and most of you already said yes without realizing it. These settings are enabled by default, and they give companies access to your entire camera roll, posts, profiles, and more.
What happened:
Every app on your phone is fighting over your camera roll and data right now, and most of you have no idea. Meta quietly added toggles that let Meta AI scan photos you have never posted. Your vacation photos and your kids sitting in your camera roll right now are all fair game.
They are saying it is for creative suggestions, but you are agreeing to let Meta analyze your faces, locations, and objects, all in your private camera roll. But they are not the only ones. LinkedIn began using your profiles, your posts, your resumes, and your public activities to train its AI. Snapchat can use everything you post publicly, including stories, Spotlight, and Snap Map, to train its AI. And X automatically activated a setting that allows the company to train Grok AI on your posts. It is enabled by default, meaning your data is shared with Musk AI Company, X AI, for training and fine-tuning purposes.
Why it matters:
When an app has access to your entire camera roll, it's not just seeing the photos you want to share with it. It's seeing everything, and that data gets used in ways you probably don't realize.
Apps use your photos to build a profile of you. They can see what you own, where you live, who you spend time with, your habits, and your interests. This is valuable to advertisers. They use it to target you with ads, sell the data to brokers, or use it to train AI models.
Then there's the security side. If an app gets hacked or sells your data, someone now has access to your entire photo library. That could mean personal images, financial documents, or anything sensitive you've photographed and stored there.
60-Second Protection Fix
Here is what you can do to protect yourself:
Facebook:
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Open Facebook → Menu → Settings & Privacy → Settings
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Scroll to Camera Roll → Turn off "Sharing Suggestions" (both toggles)
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Go to phone Settings → Find Facebook → Permissions → Set Photo Access to None
Instagram:
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Revoke broad camera and photo permissions: Go to your phone's Settings → Privacy → Photos/Camera → find Instagram → change it from "All Photos" to "Selected Photos" or "None." This stops Instagram from having a master key to your entire photo library.
Snapchat:
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Settings → Privacy Controls → Manage My Information → turn off Public Content use for generative AI training
LinkedIn:
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Data Privacy → Data for Generative AI Improvement → Turn Off
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Also, turn off "Use Data for Research."
X (Twitter):
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Settings → Privacy & Safety → Data sharing and personalization → Grok & Third-party Collaborators → turn of all boxes
Check the permissions on all of your apps
On iPhone:
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Go to Settings → Privacy → Photos
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Look through the list—you'll see every app that's asked for photo access
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Tap each one and change it to "Selected Photos" or "None"
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Do the same for Camera, Microphone, and Contacts while you're in there. Most apps don't actually need access to all of those.
On Android:
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Settings → Apps → tap each app → Permissions
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Toggle off anything that doesn't make sense (a game app with access to contacts?)
The key thing: go through your apps one by one. You'll be surprised at what you find. Social media apps, games, productivity tools, they're all asking for way more than they need. A weather app doesn't need your camera. A note-taking app doesn't need your location.
REPLAY Spot the Scammer: How to Detect Scams, Deepfakes, and AI Threats
With scams everywhere, I wanted to help you both spot the scams and stay protected. That's why I joined a U.S. Secret Service special agent and the ABA Foundation for an engaging panel discussion on the latest scams, deepfakes, and AI-driven threats. We unpacked how these schemes work and shared practical, easy-to-use strategies to safeguard yourself and your loved ones online.
What You Missed This Week
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Stay protected,
Cybersecurity Girl
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