How a Meta AI prompt changed one mom’s approach to online privacy

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Megan McCarty Carino (1:05)

Meta AI takes a creepy turn from American Public Media. This is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

A momfluencer named Kalie Robins recently tried to post an Instagram video with her kid. And then Meta's built-in AI chat bot started digging, sending her down a rabbit hole of social media privacy. She took to her feed at the time with only a few hundred followers to share her experience.

Kalie Robins (1:41)

It starts pulling completely separate information for each of my kids. Their names, birth information, pictures and videos of them. And then it says, impointing, Kalie Robins' location. I didn't ask Facebook to build a profile of my family. I posted a video of me singing in the car with my kid.

Megan McCarty Carino (2:02)

Meta responded to the incident saying it missed the mark and has fixed the issue that prompted those questions. But Robins says she's now been catapulted into the AI privacy discourse, and it's pretty uncomfortable.

Kalie Robins (2:16)

I'm completely new to this whole social media thing as far as like putting myself out there. So when I uploaded the video, I got a copyright violation notice. So I immediately started to panic. Like, oh my gosh, what did I do? What did I do?

So when I went to look at the copyright notice, that's when I saw the prompt. And initially I was like, okay, they're asking me who it is and I'm going to go in and decline it, almost like a tag. That's what I thought was going to happen. And when I saw it, it just kept offering more and more information and my stomach dropped. I felt so sick. I still feel sick about the whole thing, knowing that all of that information, not just about my daughter in the video, but my other child as well, was just offered up. I still feel uneasy about the whole thing.

Megan McCarty Carino (3:02)

And this post kind of blew up. So what was the response like?

Kalie Robins (3:06)

Oh, boy.

From friends and family in the community, it's been amazing. Nothing but support. But the original video, the support was not really there. I mean, there was a lot of people that were very kind and a lot of parents were on my wavelength, like, oh my gosh, what? What happened? But I also got a lot of backlash. Of course this happened. What did you expect? This is on you. You're the mom. It was a lot of blaming me and yes, to an extent, that was on me, but it was really harsh and unnecessarily so, in my opinion.

Megan McCarty Carino (3:44)

Yeah, I mean, there is kind of an interesting tension here. A lot of people use these platforms in a very, you know, social and intimate and personal way, staying connected, building a business, but these platforms are also businesses, you know, they're extracting data. I mean, how do you sort of reconcile that tension in your own life now?

Kalie Robins (4:10)

Very carefully. I'm just trying to be very mindful, more mindful now than I was before about what I post and who's involved, and I just have to take the criticism and just know that I'm doing the best that I can right now.

Megan McCarty Carino (4:28)

After you posted this video, you started asking friends and family to delete posts of your kids. How's that been going?

Kalie Robins (4:37)

For the most part, it's been great, but there are some family members who, when Facebook first came out, we're all using it to share memories across cities and states. A lot of these people are grandparents and great-grandparents who are very upset because this is like their digital scrapbook. And so to have these pictures deleted was a very emotional thing. I didn't think it was going to be that emotional, but for a lot of these family members, it really was. And even a couple of them just completely deleted their whole profile. Like, if I can't have these pictures, I want nothing to do with it. I'm like, that's extreme, but okay.