Meta AI builds detailed profiles of children from years of family posts

If you’re still OK with posting pictures of your kids on social media, take a minute to hear from mother of two Kalie Robins. At the start of September, she did something that hundreds of thousands of parents do every day. She posted a video of her young daughter on Facebook.

Under the video of Robins and her daughter singing in a car, Facebook’s Meta AI system displayed a suggested question: “Who is the child passenger?”

Robins was shocked that Facebook would ask this question about a minor, so curiosity prompted her to click it. That’s when a flood of automated stalker-type behavior began.

In Instagram post, an enraged Robins described what happened:

“It starts pulling completely separate information for each of my kids.”

That included names, birth dates, and videos of them.

The site also pulled up a picture of her newborn daughter that Robins’ mother had posted on Facebook years ago, along with a long-deleted picture that Robins said had once been in her own account.

Things got weirder. The site then presented another question: “Where does Kalie Robins live?”

An increasingly outraged Robins clicked that question. She described the results:

“[Facebook] started digging through completely unrelated sh*t from years of my life.”

It dug through old posts that hinted at where she had lived in the past and newer posts that connected her to her current home. It finished by attempting to pinpoint her location.

Robins complained:

“I didn’t ask Facebook to build a profile of my family.”

She expressed shock that Facebook would piece together snippets of personal information from historical posts and package them into a detailed profile for other users.

You can watch Kalie Robins’ Instagram video here: