Last week, Facebook quietly announced a bunch of updates to its AI tools, including a new AI generator called “Imagine” that lets users create or “remix” photos. However, like with most free offerings from the social media giant, there’s a catch — and of course, the catch has to do with Facebook harvesting our data. To generate these AI images, Facebook is actually scraping the data from billions of publicly available user images.

For its part, Facebook was quick to note that it doesn’t use our private images we share with friends and family. However, the “vast majority” of the training data was publicly free, so it’s clear the company was accessing plenty of images that users might not even be aware were available. And while this is a silly and low-stakes tool, some experts warn that features like that can be a gateway to collecting even more of our info.

“What seems harmless and fun — e.g., most of us didn’t think too much about privacy concerns when Facebook first launched — can quickly turn sour,” Forbes writer John Brandon noted. “Meta is probably scraping images and analyzing trends, knowing how often we share photos of kids and family. We’re feeding the beast, one image at a time.”

This is just one tool, but it’s part of a pattern with Facebook and most other tech giants. If they’re offering you something to use for free, you can be all but certain you’re actually paying for it with your data or privacy.

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