5 ways you've consented to AI data scraping without realizing it

Published Oct 29, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. AI models need huge amounts of data to train on, and researchers are warning that AI companies could run out of high-quality public data to use. Your own data isn't safe; even if you're unaware of it, AI companies may be training their models on your social media posts and more. Posting on Facebook and Instagram You might not use Meta AI, but you may be training it It shouldn't come as a surprise that Meta has very little respect for privacy or data that you might consider personal. After all, this is the company that chose to use huge amounts of pirated books to train their models. Meta uses publicly available data from Instagram and Facebook to train its Meta AI models. Public posts and photos could be used for AI training, as well as comments left under other people's posts. This includes Facebook and Instagram data that may have been posted long before training AI models was ever a thing. If you haven't touched your Facebook profile in years and have never used Meta AI, your data may still have become part of the training set. Meta says that it doesn't use the content of private messages to train its models, unless you actively choose to share those messages with Meta AI. Facebook posts restricted to Friends or Instagram posts from a private account aren't included in the training data either, but if your account is private and you leave a comment on a public post, that interaction may be scraped. Having an active LinkedIn profile LinkedIn lunatics are contributing to training data Credit: Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek | Prathankarnpap / Shutterstock LinkedIn has a generative AI training setting that specifically allows you to determine whether your data is used to train AI models. This sounds like a very sensible and useful inclusion, until you discover that by default, the setting to allow AI training is enabled. You have to manually go into your settings and disable the option to stop your LinkedIn data being used to train AI. Unlike Facebook and Instagram, this data scraping isn't limited to public profile information either. If you don't disable the setting, data including your name, photos, job history, education, location, qualifications, and more can all be used for AI training purposes. It does exclude private messages. To opt out of allowing LinkedIn to use your data, go to Data Privacy and disable Data for Generative AI Improvement. This will only prevent future use of your data, however. Public posts on X/Twitter/whatever you call it Grok can train on your data even if you've never used it Credit: xAI Another company that you might expect to have a disregard for the privacy of your personal data is X (formerly Twitter). X's Grok chatbot has come under fire for issues such as generating deepfake images. Public posts, public profile information, and engagement data can all be used to train Grok's models. This can include your display name and bio. Any conversations you have with Grok AI can also be used for training. There are two ways to opt out. Firstly, you can make your X account private, which prevents your posts from being used for training. If you want to keep your account public, go to Privacy and safety > Data sharing and personalization > Grok & Third-party Collaborators, and disable the option to allow your public data and Grok interactions to be used for training. Your conversations with AI chatbots Opting out isn't always enough to disable training Grok AI isn't the only chatbot that will use your interactions to train its models. The other major chatbots can all use data from your conversations to train models, although the arrangements are a little different from app to app. ChatGPT and Gemini both use your data for training by default and require you to opt out to stop this from happening. Anthropic takes the opposite approach, with Claude only using data from your conversations if you opt in. In ChatGPT, go to Settings > Data Controls and disable Improve the model for everyone. To stop Gemini recording your activity, go to Settings & help > Activity and turn off Keep Activity. Even disabling these features isn't a guarantee, however. For all three of the major chatbots, if you submit feedback on a response, information from the conversation that you're giving feedback on may become eligible for use as training data, even if you've opted out. The same can also be true for conversations flagged for safety issues. Anything you've published on the open web If it's out there, AI companies consider it fair game The data that is being scraped to train AI isn't just coming from specific apps and services. The need for data is real, so anything publicly available on the internet is likely to be fair game. For example, Google's privacy policy explicitly states that it collects publicly accessible information to train its AI models. This can include blog posts, personal websites, online reviews, forum comments, and more. In many cases, there's very little you can do, as there's no setting you can switch to stop models from using this data. Not every public webpage may be scraped, and posting something online doesn't automatically mean you're consenting to it being used to train AI. The reality is that if it can be accessed by the public, it could be used for AI training without you being aware of it. You have some control, but it's not complete It's a rare case where AI companies will only use your data for training AI if you deliberately opt in. In the majority of cases, if you haven't opted out, a lot of your data is considered fair game. Even then, there's only so much you can do; if you turn off every permission you can find, it may still be the case that some of your data ends up getting used.