Meta replacing humans with AI for FTC-mandated privacy reviews
Priscilla Chan (left), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Lauren Sanchez are among the guests attending Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th U.S. president at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025.
Saul Loeb | Afp | Getty Images
Meta The company will lay off an undisclosed number of employees in its risk organization as it shifts to using artificial intelligence to automate its compliance review process, the company said Thursday.
Michel Protti, Meta’s chief product officer of privacy and compliance, announced the layoffs to members of the company’s risk organization on Wednesday. report By Business Insider. CNBC confirmed the contents of this story.
Meta’s risk organization is charged with assessing and documenting various product and feature risks and ensuring the company’s compliance with regulatory bodies around the world. The organization was created after the company formerly known as Facebook was fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission as part of a settlement that also required the social media giant to restructure its approach to privacy.
The layoffs come amid broader organizational restructurings at Meta, including Wednesday’s decision to lay off nearly 600 employees working in the company’s Superintelligence Labs AI unit. But the cuts did not affect the senior TBD Labs division within Meta’s AI unit.
“Through our product risk and compliance team, we have established one of the most advanced compliance programs in the industry to help us evaluate our products and features,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “We routinely make organizational changes and restructure our team to reflect the maturity of our program and innovate more quickly while maintaining high compliance standards.”
Meta promoted Protti to lead the company’s privacy program in 2019, following a settlement with the FTC regarding the company’s Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal.
The social media company has spent the past year developing artificial intelligence technology to make risk management easier. A Meta spokesperson said the company’s revamped risk management system relies on more basic automation rather than cutting-edge AI technologies that can produce engaging text based on written prompts.
Meta VP of Policy Rob Sherman said on LinkedIn in June: to mail He said the company “developed a tool that helps teams automatically determine when legal and policy requirements apply to specific products.”
“We do not use AI to make decisions about risk,” Sherman wrote. “Instead, rules are enforced using automation, reducing the time experts must spend on approved decisions and increasing reliability because there is less room for human error.”
Other companies are also increasingly turning attention to the use of artificial intelligence technologies to reduce their workforce.
Major banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are offering artificial intelligence projects to increase profitability while slowing headcount growth. JPMorgan finance chief Jeremy Barnum told analysts during the firm’s latest earnings report that bank executives have been directed to avoid hiring humans as part of a broader application of artificial intelligence, CNBC reported last week.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in September that the software vendor would cut 4,000 customer support roles due to the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence and the “benefits and efficiencies” of the company’s Agentforce software.
“We have seen the number of support cases we investigate decrease and we no longer need to actively fill support engineer roles,” Salesforce said in a statement at the time.
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