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public citizen
'The Creepiest Possible Path': Meta Letting Facebook, Instagram Use Your Personal Posts for AI Image Generation
"People should not wake up to discover their face has become raw material for someone else’s AI experiment. This is another invasion of consumers’ privacy."
Jul 08, 2026
Tech giant Meta on Tuesday introduced an artificial intelligence image generation model that critics say is a major potential risk to users' personal privacy.
Meta, the parent company of social networks including Facebook and Instagram, described its new Muse Image model as a "creative partner that knows your world, making it easy to turn your ideas into high-quality visuals that you can download and share anywhere, including directly to your feed, story, or chat."
In its announcement, Meta explained how users can either alter existing images or create new ones from scratch using AI prompts.
"You can describe what you want in simple, conversational language, and Meta AI handles the rest thanks to Muse Image," the company said. "Ask it to mock up an image of you in front of a historical landmark, cleanly erase a photobomber from the background of a shot, or write a custom prompt to build a functional QR code."
However, tech publication The Verge on Tuesday flagged a potentially troublesome feature that could compromise user privacy, noting that "users can... mention other Instagram accounts in Muse Image prompts," which will let the AI model "incorporate their likeness into its output."
According to a Tuesday report from Wired, the feature will let users snatch photos from any public Instagram and Facebook accounts unless those accounts' owners specifically choose to opt out of the system.
What's more, opting out of the system is not a simple one-click operation.
"If you want to avoid these AI generations of your Instagram posts without switching your account to private, you’ll have to dig into the app’s settings," reported Wired. "Open the Instagram app, tap your profile, and then tap the three lines in the top-right corner of the screen. Then, scroll down to the Sharing and reuse tab. Here is where you should see a section labeled 'Allow people to use your content on Instagram and with AI features on Meta,' with a toggle for Posts and one for Reels."
JB Branch, director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen, blasted Meta for being careless with its users' privacy by making them jump through hoops to stop others from swiping their photos.
"Meta has once again chosen the creepiest possible path," said Branch. "People should not wake up to discover their face has become raw material for someone else’s AI experiment. This is another invasion of consumers’ privacy. Instead of asking for meaningful consent, Meta quietly defaults users into the system and buries the opt-out in account settings."
Branch added that while Meta had a long history of violating user privacy, forcing them to opt out of its new AI image generation model "crosses what should be a bright line."
"If our faces can be repurposed for AI simply because we posted a public photo, then very little remains off limits," Branch emphasized. "Congress should establish clear privacy protections that require affirmative consent before companies can use a person’s image or likeness for AI products."
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Court Lands Latest Blow to Trump's 'Anti-Voting Agenda' by Blocking USPS Attack on Mailed Ballots
“USPS’ plan was unwise, unlawful, and a threat to the millions of voters who rely on mailed ballots to participate in our democracy," said one case litigant.
Jul 01, 2026
In a ruling hailed by democracy defenders, a federal court on Wednesday halted the US Postal Service's implementation of President Donald Trump's March executive order targeting mail-in ballots as part of his administration's broader attack on voting rights.
Judge Emmet Sullivan of the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted a request by the NAACP to enforce a 2021 settlement agreement requiring the USPS to protect mail-in voting and prioritize delivery of mail related to elections through 2028.
The request followed the Postal Service's publication last month of a proposed rule that would block the delivery of mail-in ballots to voters in states where election officials refused to provide certain information to USPS or use a specific envelope design. That proposal came after Trump's March executive order directing federal agencies to create a nationwide list of eligible voters using federal data.
The directive also requires the Postal Service to verify that mail-in ballots are sent and returned only by eligible voters, preserve election-related records for a longer period, and exercise heightened oversight of mailed ballots.
The Public Citizen Litigation Group and Legal Defense Fund (LDF) filed a motion on behalf of the NAACP asserting that the proposed rule "manifests USPS’ intent not to deliver certain mail-in ballots, establishing a process that directly violates its obligations under the agreement."
“The court today correctly recognized that USPS’ plan to create roadblocks to mail-in voting was inconsistent with its commitment to timely deliver election mail,” Public Citizen Litigation Group director Allison Zieve said in a statement following Sullivan's ruling. “USPS’ plan was unwise, unlawful, and a threat to the millions of voters who rely on mailed ballots to participate in our democracy.”
🚨BREAKING: In the latest blow to President Donald Trump’s anti-voting agenda, a federal court on Wednesday granted the NAACP’s request to halt the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) implementation of his executive order against mail voting. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
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— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) July 1, 2026 at 1:41 PM
LDF associate director-counsel Sam Spital said, “Today’s decision recognizes that USPS cannot disregard its legal obligation to timely deliver mail-in ballots to all voters."
"We are glad that the court blocked a blatant attempt to renege on this commitment through a proposed rule that ran the risk of undermining the fairness of our national elections, creating particular dangers for Black voters," Spital continued. "LDF will continue to defend our democracy and combat unlawful restrictions of the right to vote.”
Anthony P. Ashton, senior associate general counsel at the NAACP, called the decision "a critical step in protecting the rights of voters who rely on the timely delivery of mail-in ballots to participate in our democracy."
Ashton continued:
The proposed USPS changes would have created unnecessary and unlawful barriers, in direct violation of the USPS’ mandate to prioritize election mail. Those barriers could have disproportionately harmed Black voters, who are more likely to rely on mail voting due to long-standing inequities in access. Put simply, the use of mail-in voting helps reduce voter intimidation at the polls and election day dirty tricks. This decision makes clear that access to the ballot cannot be tied to arbitrary requirements. The NAACP will continue to hold this government accountable when it attempts to undermine fair and equal access to the electoral process.
Wednesday's order—from a judge who's been appointed to various positions by Republican and Democratic presidents throughout his career—is the latest in a string of federal court rulings against Trump's attacks on voting rights, crowned by Monday's Watson v. Republican National Committee US Supreme Court decision, in which the justices affirmed that states may count ballots received after Election Day if they were postmarked in time.
Last week, a federal judge in Massachusetts sided with Democratic state attorneys who challenged Trump's March 2025 executive order that requires Americans to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote, while another judge in the same district blocked parts of the president's March 2026 order, which included the USPS directive.
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'Brazen Crypto Corruption' Helps Trump Pocket $2.2 Billion During First Year Back in Office
One expert who has studied presidential wealth called Trump's windfall "completely unprecedented" in American history.
Jul 01, 2026
Annual financial disclosures released Tuesday reveal that US President Donald Trump pocketed at least $2.2 billion—more than half of it from his family's crypto grift—during his first year back in the White House, a windfall that experts say is without precedent in American history.
The disclosure report shows that Trump pulled in $635 million in royalties from Celebration Coins, an entity linked to the president's meme coin. The president also disclosed around $527 million in proceeds from token sales by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family crypto venture spearheaded by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
“It is completely unprecedented,” Megan Gorman, a tax attorney who has studied the history of presidential wealth, told The New York Times of the president's windfall.
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement that "Trump’s obscene income is driven by various cryptocurrency schemes, leveraging his political position to exploit a scam-driven industry that he once said was nothing more than a racket."
"In doing so, he’s ripping off investors—to the tune of billions—who want to get in on the game with him, or think that buying his crypto products is an innocent means to show their support," said Weissman. "Most troubling, Trump’s personal profit interest has now aligned him with the crypto industry, paving the way for dangerous legislation that will facilitate mass rip-offs and even threaten financial system stability."
Trump's massive profits from an industry he's tasked with regulating represent what the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center (CLC) described as an "unprecedented" conflict of interest, notwithstanding the White House's laughable claim that "neither the president nor his family has ever engaged—or will ever engage—in conflicts of interest."
"We have never seen a president have direct conflicts of interest with his financial holdings and the policies he supports, and it’s another example why we need widespread ethics reform now," Kedric Payne, CLC's senior director of ethics, told The Wall Street Journal.
The Journal noted that, in addition to crypto profits, "Trump reported $4.7 million in income last year from Trump-branded watches, as well as $1.9 million in royalties from his 'Save America' book."
"Multimillion-dollar licensing deals linked to real-estate developers stretched from Romania to India to across the Middle East. A $6,484-a-month pension from the Screen Actors Guild continued paying out," the newspaper observed.
The disclosures also include tens of million dollars in legal settlements stemming from Trump's lawsuits against major companies, including ABC, CBS, and Meta.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said Tuesday that lawmakers must add language to the upper chamber's crypto legislation that prevents "the president, vice president, senior administration officials, members of Congress, and their families from profiting off the crypto industry."
"If it does not," the senator warned, "it will only turbocharge Donald Trump’s brazen crypto corruption."
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