Meta contractors say they can see Facebook users sharing private information with their AI chatbots

Business Insider spoke with four contract workers whom Meta hires through Alignerr and Scale AI–owned Outlier, two platforms that enlist human reviewers to help train AI, and the contractors noted that “unredacted personal data was more common for the Meta projects they worked on” compared with similar projects for other clients in Silicon Valley. And according to those contractors, many users on Meta’s various platforms such as Facebook and Instagram were sharing highly personal details. Users would talk to Meta’s AI as if they were speaking with friends, or even romantic partners, sending selfies and even “explicit photos.”

To be clear, people getting too close to their AI chatbots is well-documented, and Meta’s practice—using human contractors to assess the quality of AI-powered assistants for the sake of improving future interactions—is hardly new. Back in 2019, the Guardian reported how Apple contractors regularly heard extremely sensitive information from Siri users even though the company had “no specific procedures to deal with sensitive recordings” at the time. Similarly, Bloomberg reported how Amazon had thousands of employees and contractors around the world manually reviewing and transcribing clips from Alexa users. Vice and Motherboard also reported on Microsoft’s hired contractors recording and reviewing voice content, even though that meant contractors would often hear children’s voices via accidental activation on their Xbox consoles. 

But Meta is a different story, particularly given its track record over the past decade when it comes to reliance on third-party contractors and the company’s lapses in data governance.

Meta’s checkered record on user privacy

In 2018, the New York Times and the Guardian reported on how Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy group funded by Republican hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, exploited Facebook to harvest data from tens of millions of users without their consent, and used that data to profile U.S. voters and target them with personalized political ads to help elect President Donald Trump in 2016. The breach stemmed from a personality quiz app that collected data—not just from participants, but also from their friends. It led to Facebook getting hit with a $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), one of the largest privacy settlements in U.S. history.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed broader issues with Facebook’s developer platform, which had allowed for vast data access, but had limited oversight. According to internal documents released by Frances Haugen, a whistleblower, in 2021, Meta’s leadership often prioritized growth and engagement over privacy and safety concerns. 

Meta has also faced scrutiny over its use of contractors: In 2019, Bloomberg reported how Facebook paid contractors to transcribe users’ audio chats without knowing how they were obtained in the first place. (Facebook, at the time, said the recordings only came from users who had opted into the transcription services, adding it had also “paused” that practice.) 

Facebook has spent years trying to rehabilitate its image: It rebranded to Meta in October 2021, framing the name change as a forward-looking shift in focus to “the metaverse” rather than as a response to controversies surrounding misinformation, privacy, and platform safety. But Meta’s legacy in handling data casts a long shadow. And while using human reviewers to improve large language models (LLMs) is common industry practice at this point, the latest report about Meta’s use of contractors, and the information contractors say they’re able to see, does raise fresh questions around how data is handled by the parent company of the world’s most popular social networks. 

In a statement to Fortune, a Meta spokesperson said the company has “strict policies that govern personal data access for all employees and contractors.”

“While we work with contractors to help improve training data quality, 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,” the spokesperson said.

“For projects focused on AI personalization … contractors are permitted in the course of their work to access certain personal information in accordance with our publicly available privacy policies and AI terms. Regardless of the project, any unauthorized sharing or misuse of personal information is a violation of our data policies, and we will take appropriate action,” they added.