Main moments
It has It has long been known that Meta likes to stretch the knitwear when it comes to law, privacy, and general decency. But now they have also opened up to using content from private messages in Messenger and Whatsapp to “improve” their KI models.
This happens if you use the meta-AI function in a chat, for example, to summarize a message or formulate a sentence for you. Meta will not respond to whether the talks can be used for training new KI models.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said they were “taken on the bed” of Meta's Last Grip. It shows we haven't understood the game. This isn't about a single company's bad behavior -- it's about a fundamental change in how data is valued. There are two lessons to be learned:
1. We will see increasingly offensive data harvesting going forward. For tech giants, access to data is the very fuel of KI development. And now that they've started to run out of publicly available data -- the entire internet is scraped -- we should count on companies to turn a blind eye to private user data.
Meta are the most ruthless, but it's naive to think that the other tech giants won't follow suit. We should expect Google to soon “update” Gmail terms, that Microsoft finds creative ways to harvest Teams calls, and that every app on your phone becomes a potential data collector.
2. The data we give away today trains the KI models that can replace us tomorrow. Most people don't think about the fact that every email they write, every spreadsheet they fill out, or every report they deliver is stored in the cloud. But for the tech companies, this is a gold mine.
The emails don't just reveal private and sensitive information. They also constitute a library of how people solve work tasks. This can be used to train models that are gradually replacing more of our jobs.
There is an intense KI race going on where the tech giants Investing hundreds of billions of dollars in developing the most powerful language models. The goal is to create KI models that can replace all human, economic work. As the debate around this in DN has shown, no one knows exactly what work is being replaced, but the path to transformative KI runs through our data.
So how do we protect ourselves? Start by turning off the KI feature in Messenger and Whatsapp for sensitive calls. Next, you should switch to Signal for all important calls. And then we need to stop believing that free services exist; if you don't pay with dollars, you pay with data.
But this is not something individuals can solve. To protect us, we need actionable regulation at a European level. GDPR, even with its many weaknesses, ensures that Europeans have better privacy than Americans.
Regulation, however, only takes us so far. In order for Norway and Europe to truly free themselves from the tech giants, we need to develop solutions that are both competitive and safeguard our values. This is a difficult balance to strike. In the long term, we have put down a selection of 15 experts which will give Norway direction for how we should relate to ICT and data in the future.
It was a big mistake to leave social media to a small gang in Silicon Valley. Now we are at a new crossroads with KI — a technology that will change society far more than social media has ever done. This time, we need to make sure that development happens on our terms.
How to turn off Meta's data collection from private messages
1. Open the relevant chat conversation in Messenger or Whatsapp
2. Tap the name of the person (or group)
3. Select “Privacy and Support”
4. Go to “Message Permissions”
5. Turn off “Share messages with KI”
