For anyone curious how Meta could possibly get worse – excellent news.
Meta has used back-to-school pictures of schoolgirls to advertise one of its social media platforms to a 37-year-old man, in a move parents described as “outrageous” and “upsetting”.
The man noticed that posts encouraging him to “get Threads”, Mark Zuckerberg’s rival to Elon Musk’s X, were being dropped into his Instagram feed featuring embedded posts of uniformed girls as young as 13 with their faces visible and, in most cases, their names.
The children’s images were used by Meta after their parents had posted them on Instagram to mark their return to school. The parents were unaware that Meta’s settings permitted it to do this. One mother said her account was set to private, but the posts were automatically cross-posting to Threads where they were visible. Another said she posted the picture to a public Instagram account. The posts of their children were highlighted to the stranger as “suggested threads”.
The children’s images were used by Meta after their parents had posted them on Instagram to mark their return to school.
STOP POSTING PICTURES OF YOUR CHILDREN ON THE INTERNET. Even IF Meta weren’t going to use the photos for advertising purposes, that shit is still public. Even if you set it to “friends only”, you don’t know everybody on your friend list as well as you’d like to think.
When I give pictures of my children to data mining company and data mining company uses them for weird stuff.
“Who could have seen this coming? They’d been so privacy focused until now!”
2010 they changed privacy policy, even if I had everything locked down, that policy let them use my “friends” access level to glean data. Byebye facebook
STOP POSTING PICTURES OF YOUR CHILDREN ON THE INTERNET.
Stop using Facebook/Instagram.
Meta is a disgusting company and Zuckerberg is an embarrassment for humanity.
That being said, the parents of those kids are stupid fucking idiots who should feel ashamed for exposing their own kids on such a shithole of social media.
There are a shocking number of people who still think Facebook is a good way for Grandma to see back-to-school photos, and either are unaware or don’t care that ceased to be central to the platform while Obama was in office. Inertia is a bitch. And so is Zuck.
This is just the vast vast vast majority of people.
Us privacy awares are less than one % of the population.
Multiple people within the company allowed that to happen. The brightest minds money can buy. Cumulative experience that can be measured in decades either did not forsee this or shrugged it off as “not their problem.”
Nasty.
Hang on, so I need to upload government ID and/or a selfie in order to access “adult material” in order to protect kids but Meta trying to bait men with pictures of girls under the age of consent is perfectly fine? What the fuck is happening?
“Rules for thee, but not for me.”
I love how all of facebook’s privacy settings are set to ‘use and abuse me’ and periodically get reset to such every now and again. It used to tell you what shopping your friends did, like if your boyfriend bought an engagement ring. When asked if he thought this was a good thing Zuckerberg’s answer was basically, “Yes.”
Where is Collective Shout when you need them?
/s
