Facebook Advertisers Use Your Pictures For Selling Products
Facebook is dancing on a slippery slope for the past few weeks. It started off with Beacon – a feature in Facebook which broadcasts users buying habits and trends to his/her friends. MoveOn.org and other public interest sites have successfully brought that controversial feature to the forefront and forced Facebook’s hands in respecting users’ privacy. This was reported earlier on TeqEdge as a win for users over the Facebook corporate machine. But Facebook didn’t get the message. Wired magazine reports that a new feature called SocialAds is allowing companies and applications to use users’ profile pictures for media and publicity campaigns.
Facebook describes Social Ads as they …
leverage the power of Facebook News Feed by serving relevant stories about friends engaging with your business. … The ads can also be shown to users whose friends have recently engaged with your Facebook Page or engaged with your website through Facebook Beacon. … The social stories, such as a friend’s becoming a fan of your Facebook Page or a friend’s taking an action on your website …
According to William McGeveran of the Harvard Law School such acts by Facebook is borderline spam where the advertiser is inserting the user into its ad campaign without explicit permission. Facebook users are only asked in general if they want to share information, not if they want their name and picture to be featured in an ad for some product. If you are concerned of your profile picture ending up on the ad snippets you can restrict Facebook privacy settings.
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