When a feature offers to find your best photos or make a collage, several decisions can arrive together: access to your library, processing a picture, sharing an edit and improving an AI system. A useful privacy check separates them.
One permission. Several questions.
Access describes what an app is allowed to read through a device permission. Apple and Android offer ways to manage that access, including selected-media options in supported circumstances. This tells you something about the permission you granted. It does not, by itself, tell you which files reached a server. Apple: limited photo-library access; Android: selected photos and videos
Processing asks what happens to the media a feature uses. An image can be processed without being publicly posted. Whether processing happens on the device or in a cloud service is a further question, and one we should not answer from a permission screen alone.
Training asks whether information may help improve a model. Meta’s camera-roll explanation distinguishes suggestions from content a person chooses to publish or share with its AI features. That deserves more precise language than either “every photo trains AI” or “nothing leaves your phone.” Meta: camera-roll suggestions and 2026 rollout
Changing access is not a deletion receipt.
There is a fourth question worth keeping separate: retention. Changing what an app can access now does not tell you what happens to a copy it already received. For this camera-roll feature, we could not establish a current deletion timetable from the documentation available to us. We would rather leave that question open than promise an automatic cleanup we cannot substantiate.
Choose the control that matches your goal.
Limiting library access addresses which media is available through that permission. Disabling suggestions addresses a feature you do not want. Questions about existing uploads or broader AI use need their own answers.
The practical starting point is small: review the camera-roll feature and your phone’s photo permission as separate controls. The step-by-step guide is our maintained reference; this article explains the thinking behind it.
Independent editorial guidance from Grav. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Meta, Apple or Google.