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Meta replacing humans with AI for FTC-mandated privacy reviews
Priscilla Chan, left, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Lauren Sanchez are among guests attending Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th U.S. president in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2025.
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Meta said Thursday that it’s laying off an undisclosed number of employees in its risk organization amid a company shift to use artificial intelligence to automate its compliance review process.
Michel Protti, Meta’s chief privacy and compliance officer for product, disclosed the layoffs on Wednesday to members of the company’s risk organization, according to a report by Business Insider.
Meta’s risk organization is tasked with assessing and documenting various product and feature risks and ensure that the company is complying with regulators worldwide. The organization was established after the company formerly known as Facebook was slapped with a $5 billion fine by the Federal Trade Commission as part of a settlement that also required that the social media giant restructure its approach to privacy.
The job reductions come amid broader organizational restructurings at Meta, including its decision on Wednesday to lay off about 600 employees who work in the company’s Superintelligence Labs AI unit. The cuts, however, did not impact Meta’s top-tier TBD Labs division within the AI unit.
“Through our product risk and compliance team, we’ve built one of the most sophisticated 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 are restructuring our team to reflect the maturity of our program and innovate faster while maintaining high compliance standards.”
Meta promoted Protti to lead the company’s privacy program in 2019 following the settlement with the FTC related to the company’s Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal.
The social media company has spent the past year developing AI technology to streamline risk management. The Meta spokesperson said that the company’s revamped risk management system relies on more basic automation rather than more bleeding-edge AI technologies that can generate compelling text based on written prompts.
Meta Vice President of Policy Rob Sherman said in a June LinkedIn post that the company “built a tool that helps teams automatically identify when legal and policy requirements apply to specific products.”
“We’re not using AI to make decisions on risk,” Sherman wrote. “Instead, the rules are applied using automation, reducing time experts need to spend on the ratified decisions, while increasing reliability because there’s less room for human error.”
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