Hot Singles Are Waiting for You!
Information anyone gives to Facebook can be used by Facebook to do things Faceook wants to do. Like use your face in a personals ad. Even if Facebook knows you’re married. Facebook used Cheryl Smith’s face this way in an ad that it showed her husband. (“oops”)
So go read more in Wife’s face used in Facebook personal ad, and please don’t tell Facebook things about me. It’s none of their business, and I don’t want to be seen as shilling for them, saying something like “Hot singles are waiting for you.”
Yeah, this story broke about five days ago, in fact. They’re blaming it on some rogue advertisers and claim they’ve dealt with the problem, but it’s probably a good idea for anyone with a Facebook account to turn off use of their pictures in ads. The setting is buried in Facebook’s rather baroque privacy settings menus. The procedure is described in many places, e.g. here:
http://genesisblogging.com/2009/07/facebook-ads-using-your-name-photo/
David,
I don’t think they commit to that. My read of their TOS is “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. 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).”
http://www.facebook.com/terms.php?_fb_noscript=1
There’s nothing there about “unless you tell us not to use the content in this way.” They may choose to respect your requests, but are not compelled to under the contract under which someone gives it to them.
Fair enough, but that’s the case for pretty much every web site that allows user-provided content. If you don’t want to grant a site license to distribute your stuff you pretty much have to host it yourself. That’s the Web 2.0 world we live in.
David,
That’s not my read of anyone elses TOS. For example, Twitter disclaims any rights to your words. Flickr is granted a license “the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Yahoo! Services solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Yahoo! Services” See 9B in http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/utos-173.html
There’s nothing about transferability or sub-licensability.