CALIFORNIA: Facebook, which is part of Meta, is going to make a significant change to its platform that may be raising privacy issues among its users. From December 16, 2025, Meta will start using chats with its AI assistant on Facebook to make ads more personalized and recommend posts, reels, and groups of interest to users.
For instance, if a user queries Meta’s AI assistant for information on hiking, the site might infer that they are interested in hiking and begin displaying associated Facebook groups, posts, reels, and ads for hiking equipment.
Meta draws an analogy with how liking a post or page today already shapes the content that is displayed to users. This new policy will, however, broaden the sources of data to include AI chat interactions in written and audio form.
Meta has promised users that AI chats will not be utilized to target ads concerning sensitive subjects like religion, politics, health, or race. Kristy Harris, Meta’s Head of Privacy, said that the new update will align with current privacy policies.
Users can have their ad preferences set in the settings menu but won’t be able to opt-out of AI chats being used to provide personalized advertising.
Moreover, users do have the ability to link their Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp Accounts through Meta’s Account Center, so chat with an AI assistant on one platform could, potentially affect recommendations, on another. including when a user has a one-to-one conversation with Meta’s AI, via WhatsApp, and Messenger.
However Harris did state that encrypted conversations would not be impacted by this update, and that user privacy would be preserved, in regards to those messages.
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Meta will signal user notification of changes beginning on October 7, 2025. Although, this update is taking place in most areas of the world, It will not impact users in the U.K., users in member states of the European Union, or individuals in South Korea.
