Open Rights Group has submitted a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK about Meta’s plans to take users’ information to “develop and improve AI”.

Find out more and read our full complaint here.

Meta emailed Facebook and Instagram users in the UK at the end of May to inform them of changes to their privacy policy that were due to come into effect on June 26. They claimed that Meta would now “rely on the legal basis called legitimate interests” to use individuals’ information for its AI development.

In addition, while Meta told users they had the right to object, it did not commit to honouring objections as a matter of course. Once a user’s data had been used by the company, it would likely be irreversible so consent could not be applied retrospectively.

On June 6, the data rights group “None of Your Business” lodged GDPR regulatory complaints in 11 EU member states, asking Data Protection Authorities to immediately stop Meta’s abuse of personal data for AI. As a result, Meta announced plans to pause these changes on June 14, and the ICO posted that Meta “responded to our request to pause and review plans to use Facebook and Instagram user data to train generative AI”.

However, so far, there has been no official change to the Meta privacy policy that would make this stop to data processing for the development of Meta’s “AI technologies” legally binding.

Therefore, ORG staff have raised a formal regulatory complaint in the UK. With this, they want to ensure that Meta’s proposals are shelved , and that the ICO protects the rights of UK residents to the same standard that other DPAs afford in the European Union.