Loading story…
Meta changed its AI-generated suggested prompts after Facebook and Instagram user Kalie Robins reported that Meta AI asked invasive questions about her young daughters and assembled details from years of family posts. Prompts including “Who is the child passenger?” and questions about the children’s ages and the family’s residence reportedly led the chatbot to surface names, birth dates, photos, videos, and inferred location information, including an image Robins believed she had deleted years earlier.
Meta said the personal-topic suggestions “missed the mark” and that it fixed the underlying prompt issue. The company maintained that Meta AI returns only material already accessible to the person making the query, but the incident renews scrutiny of the platform’s AI privacy controls following reports of publicly shared AI chats, an alleged private-chat ID-guessing exposure, and plans to use AI interactions for advertising targeting.
Track how attackers are adapting to this technology.
6 events from the most recent confirmed update back to the earliest known activity.
Meta AI subsequently suggested “Where does Kalie Robins live?” Robins reported that selecting it caused the system to analyze historical and newer posts to infer past residences and attempt to pinpoint her current location.
After Kalie Robins posted a video with her young daughter, Meta AI suggested “Who is the child passenger?” and, after she selected it, assembled information about her children from historical posts. Robins said the material included names, birth dates, videos, photographs from relatives' accounts, and an image she had previously deleted.
Meta began targeting users with advertisements based on their Meta AI conversations late in the prior year, according to the reports.
Meta launched Meta AI and integrated the assistant into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
Robins said she planned to remove identifiable photographs and videos of her children from social media and ask friends to remove such material from their accounts.
Meta said the prompt feature should not have suggested questions about personal topics involving Robins and her children, and said it fixed the underlying issue. The company maintained that Meta AI only surfaced material already accessible to the person making the query.
Vulnerabilities, threat actors, malware, products, organizations, and breaches Mallory has linked to this story.
Follow how adversaries are adapting to this technology, and where it touches your stack today.
3 references tracked. Mallory keeps watching after this page renders.
malware.news
Open sourcemalwarebytes.com
Open sourcetheverge.com
Open sourceMap indicators from this story to your assets and identify affected systems in minutes.
Every observed campaign, victim, and pivot linked to actors named in this story.
Malware, exploits, and IOCs connected to the activity described here.
YARA, Sigma, and Snort rules deployed to your SIEM as soon as they’re published.
Get matching new stories delivered to your team as they break — not the next morning.
Ask questions about this story and take action on the answers.
Other stories Mallory is tracking that overlap on entities, sources, or topic labels.
A new study has demonstrated that even after regulatory restrictions on explicit ad targeting, algorithmic profiling remains prevalent on social media platforms such as Facebook. Researchers used a pipeline leveraging large language models (LLMs), specifically Gemini 2.0 Flash, to analyze over 435,000 Facebook ad impressions and found that these models could infer private user attributes—including age, gender, employment, education, and political preference—from ad exposure alone, with accuracy surpassing random guessing and demographic baselines. The study highlights that, despite Meta's removal of direct targeting options for sensitive categories, its ad ranking system still introduces demographic patterns that can be exploited by adversaries with access to visible ads. Simultaneously, privacy advocates have raised concerns about Meta's new policy that personalizes ads and content based on users' interactions with its generative AI features across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. The policy, which does not allow users to opt out, has prompted warnings that it could erode privacy protections, especially regarding sensitive topics discussed in AI chats. Experts question whether Meta's assurances about not using certain sensitive topics for ad targeting are sufficient, given the potential for indirect profiling and the use of proxy signals. The convergence of these developments underscores growing risks to user privacy from AI-driven ad targeting and profiling on major social media platforms.
Jun 29, 2026
Meta ran a covert internal effort known as **Project Cannes** that used hundreds of contractors to pose as minors and test how rival AI chatbots responded to high-risk prompts about suicide, self-harm, sex, eating disorders, and drugs. According to internal materials, the operation was managed by contractor **Covalen** and targeted **OpenAI ChatGPT**, **Google Gemini**, and **Character.AI**, with workers creating dummy under-18 accounts and submitting both text prompts and images designed to trigger unsafe or policy-violating responses. One reviewed testing round in August 2025 reportedly generated more than **45,000 prompts**, and internal spreadsheets allegedly stored account details including names, email addresses, passwords, and birth dates while logging model responses in comparative databases. Meta described the activity as routine AI safety benchmarking and said competitor data was not used to train its own models, but the targeted companies were reportedly unaware of the testing and argued the practice may have violated platform and API terms because it was conducted covertly on third-party systems using falsified identities.
Jun 30, 2026
Meta is facing renewed scrutiny after the Tech Transparency Project reported that more than **7,500 ads** for AI-powered “nudify” services appeared on **Facebook** and **Instagram**, despite platform rules banning sexually exploitative content. The ads promoted tools that digitally remove clothing from images of women, raising concerns about AI-enabled sexual abuse and failures in ad moderation across Meta’s platforms. The report said the ad surge was tied to **GatherOne**, a Chinese advertising partner that may spend more than **$70 million annually** on Meta ads. Researchers also said one promoted app had previously been linked to **child sexual abuse material**. Meta said it takes aggressive action against nudify apps and can remove ads, impose financial penalties, or suspend advertiser accounts, but the findings are likely to intensify regulatory and public pressure over how the company handles abusive AI content and high-spending advertisers.
Aug 5, 2026