Instagram is incorporating users' photos in ads for Meta Glasses
twitter.com217 points by notRobot 5 hours ago
217 points by notRobot 5 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...
I wonder if terms and conditions vary between jurisdictions. I would guess so.
Those are incredible terms that no one read.
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.
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.
Speak for yourself.
“Few”, maybe.
"No one" does not literally mean "not a single individual" in common English parlance, something that everyone (see what I did there?) here understands.
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.
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.
NoScript allows most of the modern web to work with selective whitelisting.
> 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?
"respect your choice" sounds like it means something but doesn't mean something.
> 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!
I can confirm it works exactly as well as putting "everything belongs to its original owners, no copyright intended" in your youtube video description
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"
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?
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's about the "in which scenario" question of the OP, not this dating ad in particular.
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.
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.
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.
Many people want to date their own friends? Seeing your friend is on the site would show it's okay to use?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Small businesses are pretty important for a number of reasons and I think if people adopted this stance it would hurt them a lot more than it would hurt Meta.
You can't create shell account on fb/meta anymore. They will ask to turn on camera and rotate your head.
Print out a face of someone on Facebook and use that?
It’ll be obvious when you turn “their” head that it’s not real.
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.
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.
[delayed]
Just stop using that cursed website
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.
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
"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?
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.
Sometimes it seems like Black Mirror screenwriters work at Meta as a side hustle.
As if Meta glasses weren't creepy enough already.
I feel like having an account on a Meta site is today’s equivalent of being a smoker.
There isn't better analogy. I hope it spreads and we will see the same effect and social pressure as smokers faced.
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.
Comment on that thread:
> This seems entirely counter-productive and creepy.
Apt description of Instagram in general.
Why? Because they can, and they will.
Leaving these services looks difficult or impossible, until you do it, and the world just keeps spinning.
Ten years ago maybe this causes outrage, but I'm not sure anyone cares in 2026 including potential customers.
I actually find this incredible, since this highlights how desperate they are to advertise these glasses
IG users were the proverbial product on this free-to-partake vanity fair since its inception.
As horrible as it sounds.
For the median user, It really is impossible to have an alternative to instagram / whatsapp / facebook. It is so easy to live in a bubble and say I'll host my own things. but a totally different thing to have a functioning network effects machine.
Something similar happened to me a few years ago. my photo was used in an ad, making it look like I was selling stuff and promoting a page I’d never even clicked on... absolutely mind-blowing....
Is there actual proof that they are doing this. Theres not much to go on in the tweet.
Besides the proof in the screenshot? What more do you want?
Do you think this user is faking it?
Yes people frequently fake screenshots on social media. I'd want either a screenshot from a credible person, reporting from a journalist, trusted blogger, company statement etc.
I'm not a journalist, but I don't think a reporter would go much further than "one user said...".
There is no need for fact checking an individual source, other than to verify the reporting is accurately representing what they said.
A credible journalist would not entertain writing a story based on a screenshot some random user posts on social media.
yes, it happened to me recently.
The photo wasn't mine, but showed a profile photo of one of my facebook friends, and it had the glasses and said "On my way!"
When you don't pay for the product... YOU are the product.
The XKCD for this exact scenario is 14 years old.
Kind of a stretch, these days can't imagine anyone that views instagram as a place to store their cherished photos also.
Yeah, and then the charging businesses start selling your stuff anyway. So really, it's the comic creator, who is naive.
Some reason that strip doesn't load for me.
It is just saying that if you don't pay for something, you are the product. I think it still fits well here.
"I'm uncomfortable"
Should have read the terms and conditions
By reading this comment, you agree to the following terms and conditions: You will send me one million dollars in small unmarked bills. Your reading this comment constitutes agreement to the preceding terms and conditions.
What percentage of people read those? They’re even unitelligible to the layman.
why are people using these products exactly?
signing away their rights to their photos? making psychopaths filthy rich?
if the surveillance glasses are coming, these people will also have signed away the commons, which are not theirs to give away
The surveillance glasses are nearing 3rd gen.
You'd know that if you used social media /s
I don't know what's worse - this, or all the ads/commercials for Meta Glasses featuring Kylie Jenner, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yYQO8exxaU
i edited it to the same url before opening as i usually do for twitter urls so that i can see the full conversation without being logged into twitter.
for some reason the url rewrote iteself to this: https://themenspiegel.click/c/de/52_merzchrupalla/?method=po...
which is a german language scam site. i have no explanation how this happened, whether it is xcancel.com doing this or something loaded from twitter that caused xcancel to do this. never seen anythin like it before, would like to know more.
btw any further reloads of the xcancel url to that tweet totally work as expected.
Throwing an additional anecdote into the bucket, this did not happen for me. Any chance you have a dodgy extension installed?
Sure you didn't just make a typo and hit a squatted domain?
did not think of that, maybe it's this. i tried a couple typos just now and holy shit most of these are registered and you land on some really dodgy shit, i.e. porn and sites that seem to try out browser exploits. did not find the scam site from earlier, but can't count it out either.
do not go to sites like xancel.com, xcancl.com, xcncl.com .. they are not safe. damn typoswatters.
Doubt. xcancel.com does not even seem to have any advertisements at all, when I disable ublock. Site seems remarkable clean, no thirdparty connections apart from a cdn. Sure you didn't type cancelx.com? Cause there something shady is going on. Otherwise, I would strongly suggest checking your extensions or system for malware.
I mean, what would you expect from company with morality of tobacco and slot machines producer? This is the least evil they are doing.
This thing resurface from time to time. It's the small text you never read. In this case, small part in ridiculously and intentionally big eula.
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