Meta will soon use AI chats for ad targeting because of course it will

Meta will start to gather data for the purpose of ad targeting. The company says this data will be used to “personalize the content and ads” that people see across apps like Facebook and Instagram.

The “feature” goes into effect on December 16 and Meta will start sending out in-product notifications and emails about the move on October 7. The company says this change is coming to “most regions” throughout the world, but the launch won’t impact the EU and South Korea at first.

Meta gives an example of a user talking with an AI chatbot about hiking and then seeing ads about, you guessed it, hiking. “As a result, you might start seeing recommendations for hiking groups, posts from friends about trails or ads for hiking boots,” it wrote in a blog post.

“People’s interactions simply are going to be another piece of the input that will inform the personalization of feeds and ads,” Christy Harris, privacy policy manager at Meta, .

This is the same type of ad targeting that has followed us around the internet for ages, but one-on-one conversations have typically been excluded from this sort of thing. This is just another reminder that .

There will be no way to opt out of this, according to . If you talk to a Meta chatbot, it’ll be scraping. The company notes that the chatbots will not scrape data pertaining to “topics such as their religious views, sexual orientation, political views, health, racial or ethnic origin, philosophical beliefs or trade union membership.” I’d recommend not discussing those things with an AI chatbot no matter what Meta says.