Sam Gilbert

Facebook Data

What Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp actually know about you — and straight answers to the questions people ask most, including the ones where the popular worry turns out to be misplaced.

What data does Facebook have on me?

The data Meta stores about you can include:

  • Messages and files you’ve sent or received on Facebook
  • Topics Meta thinks you’re interested in, which are used to target advertising
  • Metadata, including where and when you’ve logged in to Facebook, and what device you used
  • Details of the apps you’ve connected to your Facebook account
  • Your phone contacts, if you chose to upload them
  • Activity Meta receives from other websites and apps that use its advertising tools, even when you are not using Facebook

You can see and change most of this in Accounts Center, which now houses the ad and privacy settings that used to live in the Ad Preferences Center. Meta’s Download Your Information tool will give you a copy of what it holds.

What data does WhatsApp collect?

WhatsApp doesn’t keep the messages you send and receive, but it does collect data about how you use its services, including:

  • Usage data – the time, duration and frequency of your interactions with other users, which features you use, and when you were “last seen”
  • Device data – your hardware, operating system, app version and mobile network
  • Location data – if you use location features, such as sharing your location with a contact
  • Contact data – if you choose to upload your address book
  • Cookie data – if you use the desktop or web version

This is metadata: who you talk to and when, rather than what you say. It is still revealing, which is why it matters that Meta holds it.

What data does Instagram collect?

In addition to what you share directly, Instagram collects:

  • Metadata about your posts and messages, such as when a message was sent
  • Contact data, if you import contacts or sync from another app
  • Usage data – when you last logged in, who you interact with most, what you like and comment on
  • Device data – your phone model, available storage, whether the app is in the foreground, signal strength
  • Identifier data – cookie ID, device ID, and the identifiers linking your Instagram profile to your other Meta accounts
  • Data from advertisers, shared through Meta business tools embedded in third-party websites and apps

The details are in Meta’s Privacy Policy (renamed from the Data Policy in 2022).

Can Facebook read WhatsApp?

No. WhatsApp messages are protected by end-to-end encryption, which means only the sender and the recipient can read them — not Meta, and not anyone intercepting the message in transit.

Two caveats. Meta can still see metadata: who you message and when. And if you report a chat, the most recent messages in it are sent to Meta so the report can be reviewed.

Can Facebook read my messages?

No — not by default, on any of Meta’s messaging apps. This changed recently, and a lot of advice online is still out of date.

WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted by default for years. Messenger was not: until December 2023, Meta could read your Messenger conversations unless you specifically turned on a feature called “Secret Conversations”. In December 2023 Meta made end-to-end encryption the default for personal chats on Messenger, and Secret Conversations no longer exists as a separate setting. Encryption has since been extended to Instagram direct messages.

What encryption does not cover: metadata about who you contacted and when; messages you report to Meta; and conversations with businesses that use a third party to manage their inbox, where the business’s provider can see them.

Can Facebook hear you?

No, Meta doesn’t use your device’s microphone to listen to your conversations.

Some features do need microphone permission — voice messages and calls, for example. But there is no evidence that Meta uses the microphone for anything else, and doing so at scale would be both expensive and easy to detect.

The reason people believe otherwise is that ad targeting is sometimes uncannily accurate. That is worth sitting with: it illustrates how much can be inferred from the data Meta already has, without any need to listen to you.

Can Facebook use my photos?

Meta’s terms say that you own the content you share, including photos. They also say that by uploading a photo you grant Meta a licence to “host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy…and create derivative works of your content”.

That clause sounds alarming but is mostly technical: without it, Meta could not legally display, resize or let others re-share your photo. It is not a claim to sell your holiday pictures.

The genuinely contested question now is whether your posts can be used to train AI models — see below.

A rumour periodically circulates that posting a status declaring you own your photos changes your legal position. It does not.

Does Meta use my data to train its AI?

Partly, and it depends where you live.

Meta has used public posts, photos and comments from Facebook and Instagram to train its generative AI models. It says it does not use the content of your private messages, and does not use the accounts of users it believes to be under 18.

In the EU and UK, Meta paused this in 2024 after objections from regulators, and resumed in 2025 relying on “legitimate interests” as its legal basis, with a form allowing users to object. Elsewhere the right to opt out is weaker or absent.

If you want to limit this, the practical steps are to object through the form Meta provides in your region, and to set older posts to a non-public audience — though content already used in training cannot be pulled back out of a model.

What Meta owns

Alongside Facebook itself, Meta owns:

  • Instagram – bought in 2012 for $1 billion, which Professor Scott Galloway has called “the single best acquisition in the history of tech”
  • WhatsApp – bought in 2014 for around $19 billion
  • Meta Quest – the virtual reality headset business, acquired as Oculus in 2014 for about $2 billion and rebranded in 2022
  • Threads – launched in 2023, built in-house rather than acquired
  • Dozens of smaller technology companies, in fields including artificial intelligence (Bloomsbury AI, Ozlo), computer vision (GrokStyle, FacioMetrics, Pebbles Interfaces), speech recognition (Wit.ai), augmented reality (Surreal Vision), video and audio (Vidpresso, Fayteq, Two Big Ears), identity verification (Confirm.io) and computer hardware (Nascent Objects)

Not everything Meta buys survives. CrowdTangle, the analytics tool that researchers and journalists used to study how content spread across Facebook and Instagram, was shut down by Meta in August 2024 — a decision widely criticised by researchers who relied on it.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are all owned by Meta Platforms, which was called Facebook Inc. until October 2021. This page uses “Meta” for the company and “Facebook” for the app. Last reviewed August 2026.