The awkward truth is that the public things you have posted - photos, captions, comments - are now treated by most platforms as material to train their AI. It has usually been switched on for you by default, and the control to change it is real but deliberately hard to find. This is not a reason to panic or to delete everything. It is a reason to spend ten minutes knowing where the switch is.

On Facebook and Instagram the setting does not sit under anything obviously labelled “AI”. You are looking for a privacy or “AI at Meta” section, sometimes reached through Settings and then a data or personal-information area, and often phrased as an objection to your information being used rather than a simple on-off toggle. The wording is dry on purpose. In the UK and Europe you generally do have the right to object, which is more than users elsewhere are offered.

It helps to separate two different things while you are in there. One is whether your public posts feed AI training, which is the objection above. The other is what the platform can see about you from off the app - the sites and shops that quietly report your activity back. Both live in the privacy settings, and turning down the second is often the bigger win for the amount of effort.

Do this on the phone app rather than a browser if you can, because that is where most people actually use these services and where the menus are laid out to be tapped through. Expect the labels to have moved since anyone last wrote a guide, including this one. If you cannot find the exact wording, search the app's own help for “object” or “your information”, which tends to jump you straight to the right page.

Set a reminder to check again in six months. These controls get renamed and reshuffled with almost every big update, and a setting you switched off can quietly reappear under a new heading. Knowing roughly where to look matters more than memorising today's exact path.