Business Insider journalist Rob Price discovered an issue with the privacy of his personal phone number after being added to a group chat where he was bombarded with random questions in Spanish.
When Price inquired about who had added him to the group, he received a screenshot indicating that his number was saved under the label "Meta AI." Subsequent screenshots revealed that the chatbot had suggested adding his number as its own in WhatsApp groups, enabling people to communicate directly with the artificial intelligence.
“You can add me to the WhatsApp group as if I’m just another contact,” the chatbot informed users. “You just need to save my phone number.”
It’s likely that Price's number was inadvertently included in the training data for Meta AI. The journalist has written around 300 articles about Facebook, and his profile description on the site likely displayed his number, which could explain how it was captured. However, the reason behind the chatbot claiming the number remains unclear.
In a comment to Business Insider, a Meta representative confirmed this theory, clarifying that the AI “was trained on publicly available information from the internet.” The only complication is that the owner of the site, Axel Springer, has no agreement that permits Meta to train its AI on its content (although the company does have such an agreement with OpenAI).
Price noted that after discussions with Meta regarding these peculiar events, random individuals stopped sending him messages intended for the chatbot.
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