When you decide to upload a photo to Instagram or other social media, you’re faced with a choice: Do you want to let the app see your entire photo gallery or not? According to a HuffPost article, you should think twice before allowing it, no matter how convenient it is, privacy experts say. “By limiting access to just certain photos, you’re both protecting yourself from accidentally uploading a bunch of photos you didn’t mean to and ensuring that the app can’t access more than you want, either accidentally or maliciously,” said Thorin Klosowski, a security and privacy activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Your camera roll isn’t just filled with fun vacation photos and family photos, it’s also a document of who you are and what you like.
Many of us often take photos for verification that reveal our identity, like passports and new credit cards. These are the types of images that scammers love to exploit. The extra time it takes to select a photo forces you to think about exactly what you want to share with an app, which can compromise your privacy later.
Last year, a Facebook feature asked users to grant access to their phone’s camera roll in order to automatically suggest AI-edited versions of their photos. A pop-up window asked, “Allow cloud processing to get creative ideas from your photo gallery?” However, if users allowed this, they also opted to have their images and facial features analyzed by Meta’s AI, which bothered some users. The feature no longer appears to be available to users within Facebook. Meta did not respond to HuffPost’s questions about the status of the feature. In general, experts suggest that all users should always double-check what they’re allowing an app to see from their phone.