In the race for artificial intelligence supremacy, tech giants are no longer just scraping the open internet; they are mining our digital lives. Meta recently rolled out its new “AI Mode,” a feature designed to scan, analyse, and synthesise your past public posts to answer user queries and generate summaries. While pitched as a futuristic convenience for seamless platform searches, this development presents an immediate, systemic threat to public data privacy. By converting years of casual community interactions into structured, easily searchable intelligence, Meta has inadvertently handed bad actors the ultimate blueprint for targeted cybercrime.

As a cybersecurity researcher, my primary concern is how easily raw data can be weaponised. When public information is unstructured, a criminal has to work hard to find a target. Meta’s AI Mode eliminates that friction.

The most dangerous element of AI Mode is its efficiency. It allows bad actors to map out human behaviour, vulnerabilities, and real-time needs at scale.

Consider a highly plausible scenario: a user utilises Meta AI to find out who is looking for concert tickets in a specific city within public groups. Instead of a scammer manually scrolling through pages of comments, the AI instantly provides........

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