Your chats with Meta AI will start affecting what ads you see on Facebook and Instagram (www.techradar.com)

Meta will start using conversations with its Meta AI assistant on Facebook and Instagram to personalize ads and other content, beginning December 16, with user notifications rolling out this month. The change covers both text and voice chats and applies platform-wide with no opt-out — the only practical way to avoid having those interactions feed ad targeting is to stop using the assistant. WhatsApp conversations are excluded for now, and the rollout skips the EU and UK due to GDPR and related privacy rules. Technically, Meta will treat AI chats like other behavioral signals (likes, posts, clicks) to tune recommendations and ad delivery — for example, asking about hiking could trigger hiking-related groups, posts, or ads. Meta says it will exclude “sensitive” categories (politics, religion, sexuality, health), but definitions and classification errors are likely. The move blurs the boundary between conversational assistance and data collection, potentially increasing sharing because chats feel private while still fueling monetization. It also signals an industry trend (Google’s Gemini, Amazon’s Rufus are exploring similar uses), raising regulatory, UX, and privacy trade-offs users and policymakers will need to weigh.