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Posted by notRobot 4 hours ago

Instagram is incorporating users' photos in ads for Meta Glasses(twitter.com)
213 points | 91 comments
Cthulhu_ 4 hours ago|
Didn't Facebook do this years and years ago?

Yes, 2013: https://mashable.com/archive/facebook-ads-photo#ggcKnNfAUaqy

> According to Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities:

> You give us permission to use your name, profile picture, content, and information in connection with commercial, sponsored, or related content (such as a brand you like) served or enhanced by us. This means, for example, that you permit a business or other entity to pay us to display your name and/or profile picture with your content or information, without any compensation to you. If you have selected a specific audience for your content or information, we will respect your choice when we use it.

So it's not new. If you don't want this, delete your facebook account: https://www.facebook.com/privacy/dialog/delete-your-informat...

smalltorch 2 hours ago||
Those are incredible terms that no one read.
Groxx 41 minutes ago|||
Almost literally every single social media site in the past ~15+ years has had those exact terms in it.

Everything you upload, almost everywhere, can be used by the site owners to do whatever they like for their own purposes (reselling is somewhat often excluded / non-transferrable). There are a handful of exceptions, but they're very much exceptions, not the normal rule.

acdha 2 hours ago||||
I cancelled my Instagram account when they added those terms in the early 2010s. At the time it was mostly photographers reading them and closing accounts but it wasn’t exactly a secret.
DANmode 2 hours ago|||
Speak for yourself.

“Few”, maybe.

satvikpendem 2 hours ago|||
"No one" does not literally mean "not a single individual" in common English parlance, something that everyone (see what I did there?) here understands.
smalltorch 2 hours ago||||
I mean, I read them, but just goes to show the majority of people skipped this important reading.

If anyone actually read them it's typically a unlimited unrestricted pipe of data they can use for anything.

Espressosaurus 2 hours ago||
No one reads the terms and conditions. I went to a resort and read the T&C they made you sign to sign in and was told I was the only person in months who had actually done so.

And even I have mostly given up on the website T&C because most of them are so lengthy, a lot like I've given up on disabling javascript since the modern web frequently won't even render anything if you disable it.

kevin_thibedeau 34 minutes ago||
NoScript allows most of the modern web to work with selective whitelisting.
cute_boi 2 hours ago|||
99% of people don't read terms and condition.
DANmode 2 hours ago||
We’re saying the same thing.
rootusrootus 2 hours ago|||
> If you have selected a specific audience for your content or information, we will respect your choice when we use it.

To be fair, if they actually honor this promise, and if it means what it sounds like in plain English -- i.e. that if you only posted your photo for friends, only friends can ever see it even if FB uses it for advertising -- that is a halfway decent mitigation of the issue. Not ideal, but then again, you're not paying for FB, so what did you really expect?

microgpt 1 hour ago||
"respect your choice" sounds like it means something but doesn't mean something.
bryanrasmussen 17 minutes ago||
respect your choice may mean something if a court decides.
jubilee33 41 minutes ago|||
Yes, like immediately after they were beta on unsuspecting university students. Anyone with a Facebook in 2026, ...well we can't just say they deserve it because that is definitely (no sarcasm intended) blaming the victim. But sometimes it feels like, why does the Nigerian Prince scam keep working after 30 plus years? Do we have to sacrifice the weak and vulnerable to have any sense of freedom and creativity? I don't know honestly ...perhaps?
pavel_lishin 3 hours ago|||
> If you don't want this, delete your facebook account

What? I thought I could just paste a paragraph of all-caps legalese to my profile, and it would solve this!

hmry 19 minutes ago|||
I can confirm it works exactly as well as putting "everything belongs to its original owners, no copyright intended" in your youtube video description
pbhjpbhj 2 hours ago||||
To be fair it seems like it should be equally valid in contract law.
steve1977 3 hours ago||||
This made me laugh and cry at the same time...
realusername 22 minutes ago|||
Both sounds kind of the same thing to me, a wall of text that nobody will read and each essentially saying "I have the right to do whatever I want"
vee-kay 1 hour ago||
FYI, Meta earns billions by showing scam ads.

https://qz.com/consumer-federation-america-sues-meta-scam-ad...

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

It is unlikely that Meta will suddenly gain morals scruples to avoid profiting from user content, with or without user consent.

This is the same company that invasively spies on its own employees, to train AI models.

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-accidentally-let-employees-...

Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — has a long history of abusing user trust. It has been fined billions for illegal activities like unauthorised data harvesting (Cambridge Analytica), illegal facial recognition, and mishandling children’s private information. Beyond what’s illegal, Meta is ethically notorious for emotional manipulation experiments, addictive design targeted at teenagers, rampant surveillance (even of non-users), promoting misinformation, and ignoring research that shows its products harm mental health.

https://leehopkins.com/meta-data-abuse-revealed/

RattlesnakeJake 3 hours ago||
Many years ago (back when Facebook still had sidebar ads), my sister was presented with a dating ad for "Hot Christian Singles" accompanied by a photo of our brother.

It was hilarious, but also mind-boggling. In what scenario would pulling in a friend's profile photo create a useful ad?

dewey 3 hours ago||
> In what scenario would pulling in a friend's profile photo create a useful ad?

Exactly in the scenario you just described. You still remember it and you are actively talking about it years after the fact.

fumblebee 2 hours ago|||
wouldn't "useful ad" imply either 1) clicking through and buying the product or service, or else 2) building up a positive brand association to help increase sales later?

remembering an advert correlates but is different to it being valuable.

svachalek 1 hour ago||
Yeah I remember some studies showed this with overly sexy ads. They were very memorable to the audience but all they remembered was hot chicks, they couldn't recall the product.
not_a_bot_4sho 2 hours ago||||
Sounds like the viewers were highly unlikely to have clicked through. Cost the advertiser a view but lost the conversion.

Useful ad for Facebook. They made money on it. The advertiser didn't.

hbn 1 hour ago||||
Zero people in the process of creating that ad said "we'll suggest people date their siblings, it'll be so memorable"

That is absolutely not a success story when trying to market a Christian dating platform.

dewey 55 minutes ago||
It's about the "in which scenario" question of the OP, not this dating ad in particular.
RattlesnakeJake 2 hours ago||||
But it didn't bring clicks to the website nor goodwill toward the company.

No one remembers who ran the ad. Even if we did, it would only be in a negative light due to a weird and off-putting advertising approach.

dewey 2 hours ago||
Don't get hung up on this specific example of the dating ad.

There's a difference between awareness campaigns and click / conversion campaigns and if there's some ads for a garden chair and your friend is sitting on it you'll definitely remember it more than some random model. Or clothes that are advertised on your body. Not saying that's the future we want, but it would definitely work for a while.

dwa3592 1 hour ago||||
This is a ridiculous argument that just because someone still remembers something means it was a good advertising strategy. This is partly why advertising sucks. The correct metric in this case would be did the user actually go on the date with the said person or at least initiated the conversation. In this person's case, very likely not. So the strategy is dumb, ridiculous and laughable but not useful or good in any sense.
boelboel 1 hour ago|||
Many people want to date their own friends? Seeing your friend is on the site would show it's okay to use?
PyWoody 2 hours ago||
Roll tide.
srmatto 2 hours ago||
Is Meta abusing its users a problem? Yes. Does the TOS allow for it? Yes. Can people decide to just create a shell account and not actually participate? Sure.

One of the real insidious problems with Instagram and to some extent Facebook is that they provide a free, low friction way for business to communicate with current or potential customers. As a result many small businesses use Instagram as replacement for a public facing website and perhaps a blog or email newsletter. Many small business in my region depend on Instagram for this purpose, its nearly universal. It helps keep you stuck in Instagram so that you can see a business' hours, menu, or special events. I guess a shell account is the answer but you're still going to have to navigate the skinner box feed.

haliskerbas 2 hours ago||
Every time I try to create a shell account, it gets banned with no reason given. Even if it's just to follow a few influencer accounts.
srmatto 2 hours ago||
Well there you go, there is no reasonable way to be a non-participant while also staying up to date on businesses that choose to use the platform.
microgpt 1 hour ago|||
We need a Nitter for Instagram.
burkaman 1 hour ago||
https://imginn.com/ or https://codeberg.org/irelephant/kittygram
plagiarist 1 hour ago|||
If the only way to interact with a business is via Facebook or Instagram, I don't interact with the business.

Unfortunately this is more of a problem for me than it is for them. I hope my position on this becomes more popular over time so that everyone can stop using spy- and adware.

cute_boi 2 hours ago||
You can't create shell account on fb/meta anymore. They will ask to turn on camera and rotate your head.
ed_elliott_asc 2 hours ago|||
Print out a face of someone on Facebook and use that?
afavour 2 hours ago||
It’ll be obvious when you turn “their” head that it’s not real.
rolph 51 minutes ago||
print out a panagram of a head, and paste it to a lampshade, or use a mannequin head and describe how you were horribly burned as a child.
catlikesshrimp 2 hours ago|||
U a manequin head. Add hair and moles. It mightbtake more than one try but it works. Eventually, people who make shell accounts will be declared creepy child predators, but that isn't the case, yet.
remywang 1 hour ago||
Just stop using that cursed website
fourside 1 hour ago|
It really is that simple. “Users of company with a long track record of unethical behavior surprised at the company’s latest unethical business decision.”

I know it’s not easy for some to stop using their platform for some reason or another. That’s the point. When you use their product not because they are the best choice in a free market with options, but when you use it because you have to. Just don’t surprised when FB keeps pushing the limits.

penr0se 3 hours ago||
This shouldn't really be surprising. It's very similar to what they did ~1.5 year ago when they started to use users' photos to promote Meta AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615538

red_admiral 13 minutes ago||
As if Meta glasses weren't creepy enough already.
microgpt 1 hour ago||
https://xcancel.com/venturetwins/status/2071277885646868536
bcraven 30 minutes ago|
"Damn, this is creepy level though & generally I’m all for ads knowing everything about me. Putting my wife’s profile pic in an ad is too much"

Presumably this reply is a joke?

giancarlostoro 28 minutes ago||
Amazing we live in an age where making a fake image of someone that looks realistic enough (and for a tiny thumbnail resolution to boot) with a company that makes arguably lesser used but somewhat frontier AI models, not using said models to make these ads less intrusive, whilst still making them feel slightly personalized.
VortexLain 1 hour ago||
Sometimes it seems like Black Mirror screenwriters work at Meta as a side hustle.
encomiast 2 hours ago|
I feel like having an account on a Meta site is today’s equivalent of being a smoker.
nicce 2 hours ago|
There isn't better analogy. I hope it spreads and we will see the same effect and social pressure as smokers faced.
catlikesshrimp 2 hours ago||
Vaping is the new smoking. Except you knew what was inside a cigar, while vape liquid is a generic term for anything inside a bottle.
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