Some users have noticed settings that let Meta analyze and retain phone photos

Meta isn’t just crawling your photos. If you gave it permission not just “While using the app” to anything, it’s gathering up metadata about you and sending it home. Contacts, emails, location, imei, photos, video exif, browser history if you happen to open a mini-safari view from an ad, app usage statistics, your IP address, your device information, anything they can gather - they are.

I uninstalled Facebook, Meta, MetaQuest, Instagram and deleted my accounts. I’ll never put one of their apps on my phone again.

Even without permission, they're doing as much as they can technically manage: https://localmess.github.io/

Uninstall is indeed the only option. There is no way in hell this is the last time they do something like this, nor is it the first.

Some of those data brokers have no qualms with breaking cybersecurity laws either.