NLPC presented a shareholder proposal on Wednesday at Meta‘s 2025 annual meeting of shareholders that asked the company to report on its AI data privacy efforts. NLPC warned that Meta’s history of data ethics violations could torpedo its AI initiatives. Instead, NLPC argues the company should focus on privacy to differentiate from competitors such as Microsoft or Alphabet.
The company’s board of directors opposed our proposal, as explained on pages 86-86 of its proxy statement. NLPC’s response to the board’s opposition statement was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month.
Presenting the proposal at the meeting was Luke Perlot, associate director of NLPC’s Corporate Integrity Project. An audio recording of his presentation can be found here, and a transcript of his three-minute remarks follows:
Good morning.
Artificial intelligence is revealing itself as one of the most transformative innovations in modern economic history, with power to improve everything from health care to financial services—but only if it is built on trust.
AI thrives on data, yet that hunger tempts developers to harvest vast amounts of information that may be obtained unethically or illegally.
Meta stands at the very center of this dilemma. The Company boasts that its Llama models are trained on trillions of tokens, many drawn from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—platforms where people share memories with friends, not source material for commercial AI systems.
Meta’s recent privacy policy rewrite permits an expansive range of personal images, videos, and text to be funneled into its models without explicit consent.
European regulators have already levied a record €1.2 billion fine against Meta for unlawful data transfers, and lawmakers worldwide are sharpening their focus on AI data abuse.
Meanwhile, the integration of “Meta AI” directly into core products magnifies the risk that sensitive prompts or private chats could be ingested and resurfaced in unexpected ways, exposing the Company to class actions, regulatory penalties, and reputational damage that no marketing budget can cure.
Consumers consistently tell pollsters they do not trust companies to handle their data; meanwhile, McKinsey finds firms that lead on privacy gain a durable competitive advantage, while laggards bleed users and revenue.
Shareholders therefore have a clear interest in understanding how Meta acquires, vets, and deploys external information, and whether adequate safeguards exist to prevent misuse.
Proposal Eleven asks only for a straightforward, annually updated report describing the material risks of improper data sourcing, the controls in place to mitigate them, and the metrics by which effectiveness is measured.
Transparent disclosure will help protect Meta’s unprecedented valuation, reassure billions of users, and demonstrate that the Company intends to win the AI race without abandoning the principles that first made its platforms indispensable.
A concise audit will cost little yet yield outsized returns in goodwill, compliance readiness, and long-term value for both the Company and its global community.
I urge my fellow shareholders to vote FOR Proposal Eleven. Thank you.
Read NLPC’s shareholder proposal for the Meta annual meeting here.
Listen to Luke Perlot’s presentation of the proposal at the meeting here.
Read NLPC’s response, filed with the SEC, to the company’s opposition to our shareholder proposal, here.
