Ensuring data privacy is important, but not for big companies that only see data as a way to sell more ads. In fact, Meta recently announced a change to its privacy policy that will impact how ads are served to users of Meta's many platforms.
Ads based on your content
Yesterday, Meta announced plans to improve ad recommendations on its apps. These recommendations will be "based on people's interactions with our generative AI features" for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other Meta platforms. The company will officially alert users of these platforms of the privacy policy change on 7 October 2025, so here's your early advance warning.
Essentially, Meta will use voice chats, text messages, or other content sent to Meta AI to personalise the ads and content you may see. This is expected to include "posts and reels", which confirms that Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram will be affected. In the example given, users who posted a reel about hiking may get recommendations to hiking groups or ads for hiking boots.
AI recommendation algorithm?
Mind you, this isn't something new. Except now Meta uses an AI for the recommendation process, instead of a standard software algorithm. After all, AIs are also a form of algorithm, albeit one that could hallucinate. In that sense, whether Meta AI can perform better than a standard recommendation algorithm remains to be seen.
The new changes will apply on 16 December 2025, so you may want to create more sub-accounts for different activities. It may be useful in preventing your main account from being cluttered by other ads, but what do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!
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