Facebook Lets Advertisers Use Pictures Without Permission 260
Krokz sends in an LA Times piece that begins "A warning is bouncing through cyberspace today, landing on the Facebook statuses of many of the social networking site's users. The message: 'Facebook has agreed to let third party advertisers use your posted pictures without your permission.' It continues with a prescription of how you can protect your photos." The attention-grabbing incident in this furor involved a married woman, whose photo appeared in an ad for a dating service that was presented to her husband to view. Fortunately, both husband and wife had a sense of humor about it.
The Evil Plot (Score:2, Insightful)
In other news (Score:2, Insightful)
facebook generation (Score:5, Insightful)
unless facebook has you sign a proper model release form, i can't see how this kind of use is going to hold up.
Re:Unfounded rumor - Read the official facebook bl (Score:1, Insightful)
The parent comment - not mine ;-)
Re:Unfounded rumor - Read the official facebook bl (Score:4, Insightful)
What Mark Zuckerberg really means is:
We have banned the third party applications responsible for exploiting the privacy of our userbase, because we reserve the right to exploit their privacy OURSELVES".
After all, there IS an option for this in the user settings, so its eems pretty clear that they either already do something similar or intend to in the future. The response from facebook is nothing more than Apple kicking an application out of their iphone app store, because they want to introduce their own version of it and make the money for themselves.
Careful when you read them TOS's! (Score:3, Insightful)
So please Facebook, just put all the creative commons license choices on there, and the problem is solved
Re:Hey you Kids! Pay Attention! (Score:2, Insightful)
As usual with Facebook controversies, you can very easily opt out of this and never have your photo used by an advertiser.
You can't just assume you have permission - any contract like this must be opt in.
And of course, Facebook is not mandatory, it's something that you choose to be part of.
What if the terms are changed retroactively, to photos you already uploaded?
What if you're not on Facebook and someone uploads a photo of you, that then gets used in an advert?
And of course, why in hell do so many people post illegal or embarrassing items to a fairly public and insecure site?
Off-topic. There are plenty of photos I might not mind being visible to a restricted set of people (Facebook photos don't have to be "public" FYI), but would mind being in an advertising campaign. In fact, even if I was okay with a photo being entirely public, doesn't mean I want it in an advertising campaign.
(This assumes that the story is true - if it isn't, then there's nothing to worry over anyway.)
Re:facebook generation (Score:2, Insightful)
what if you go for a job and they recognise you from a site you have nothing to do with called bustedpartysluts.com?
If they recognize me from bustedpartysluts.com I'm not sure I'd want to work for them...or would that make a very interesting workplace?
Re:Unfounded rumor - Read the official facebook bl (Score:5, Insightful)
I do think users need to take some responsibility. They should be more careful about the text and photos they upload to some company's servers, and the applications they enable. But still it seems that Facebook is way too permissive with privacy and security settings, and that they are continually pushing the boundaries of what's acceptable with respect to advertising. For instance, why is it that when you go: SETTINGS > PRIVACY SETTINGS > NEWS FEEDS AND WALL, the "Appearance in Facebook Ads" is by default enabled. You need to manually turn it off. Yes it's up to users to manage their privacy settings, but having users continually being opted-in to these kinds of things (without any particular announcement, that I'm aware of) smacks of "let's see what we can get away with--and apologize only if we have to...".
Re:Careful when you read them TOS's! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Actually, facebook modified their terms recently, such that their rights to materials you upload expire if you choose to terminate your facebook account. I agree that it's still not good to grant them that right at all, even if it's not forever though."
Not exactly [facebook.com]:
"For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account (except to the extent your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it)."
Of whom does "others" consist? I don't know.
Re:Sense of humor? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sense of humor? (Score:3, Insightful)
> What if someone else posts a picture in which you are present?
What if the New York Times puts a photo with you in it on their front page? The photographer owns the copyright.
Re:Sense of humor? (Score:1, Insightful)
Duh!
:)
Re:Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Before you start googling around, remember that once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Re:In other news (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Unfounded rumor - Read the official facebook bl (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow.. way to rake in the Karma there :-P.
Re:then what do they actually use? (Score:3, Insightful)
Mine was opted-in by default. I never changed it. I didn't even know it existed. And I don't use applications so none of those changed it.
Re:Sense of humor? (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest reason that facebook et al need to be pursued on this, is not just the theft of image but, far more importantly the theft of your honesty and integrity. By using your image, they are implying that you approve of and recommend the product that your image is attached to. It is very much a theft of who you are. So not a copyright infringement but a fraudulent misrepresentation, it really is one of the worst 'marketing' abuses I have ever come across.
That facebook would stoop this low is a real warning to users or more accurately as it turns out, the used of facebook, time to shift locations, things are bound to get worse as try push to monetise - 'you'.
Honey? (Score:5, Insightful)
"What is your photo doing on an on-line dating site?"
"Honey. What ate you doing looking through on-line dating sites?"
Re:facebook generation (Score:2, Insightful)
This seems somewhat generous... People posting pictures online may know what they're doing, insofar as they don't care that others know they were at a party last weekend, or whatever else. But precious few are posting with the active intent of "creating a transparent society..."
Re:facebook generation (Score:4, Insightful)
You know what is sad? It's not going to end like that. It's going to end instead with so many high profile people getting burned (read: sons and daughters of politicians) that they will use it as propaganda to introduce laws to control / regulate / filter / disable the internet as we know it today. You'll have to be licensed to run a web site. Compulsory training. Mandatory insurance. Complex data security and logging laws that make it so burdensome to operate a simple web site that it will retreat to being something only possible for big corporations and beauracracies to do. You can already see it starting in the EU but that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Re:did everyone with a facebook account.... (Score:2, Insightful)
You see advertisements? Why aren't you using adblock like the rest of us?
Until this whole ordeal, I didn't even realize Facebook *had* ads.
Re:facebook generation (Score:3, Insightful)
[quote]My generation isn't stupid. They know what they're doing -- they're creating a transparent society where we can all be a bit more polite to one another because everyone has dirt on everyone else[/quote]
No.
Your (mine too) generatrion isn't STUPID, they're ignorant. They literally do not understand that when they upload their photos to their "private" profile, there is nothing to prevent me, or you, or anybody else from writing a perl scrip that walks through all of my "friends" downloading all of their photos, and saving them to my computer for some sort of future use.
Getting dirt on everybody so that there is dirt on *nobody*? Lets over-look how stupid this is for a second, and pretend just for the sake of argument that that is even possible. Not everybody uses facebook. So there is not dirt on *everybody*. What happens when the fox news of 30 years from now is looking up dirt on whatever person is running for president at that time? Do you think they're going to ignore the photos that that guy or girl's friends posted of them doing a beer bong at a party 30 years ago that they didn't know about?
The people who chose NOT to ues facebook, or whatever social network will pop up in the next couple of years to replace it, are going to have a considerable advantage over those who used it.
No. They're going to absolutely and completely rip them to shreds. Look at how some web forums like 4chan have used the leverage that they can gain from places like facebook to blackmail people into doing what they want? This IS only going to get worse.
The ubiquity of cameras is, and should be, frightening. Any "advice" to the contrary should be taken as borderline malicious.
Re:Hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
I believe the defaults should be set to the most private setting, and allow users to SHARE their stuff. Facebook does it the other way round, they say all your stuff is public unless you specifically disallow it. How is that fair? Its an open abuse of people's right to privacy, and for the (hopefully brief) time between the change and when the user realises and updates their privacy settings, facebook has had a field day with your personal details.