New York Times: Can You Protect Your Image While on Facebook?
The New York Times’ Gadgetwise blog has a post about privacy and social networking site Facebook. (You can read more about Facebook and privacy in the archives.)
Ads on Facebook that inappropriately used members’ profile pictures set off a mini-firestorm online this week –- and got lots of people talking about how to avoid unwittingly becoming a shill for products on Facebook.
Attention on the issue was brought about with an outraged post on AOL’s Download Squad blog about a man who, while using a third-party app, saw an ad for a dating site that, to his surprise, was dressed up with his wife’s picture. No, she wasn’t looking for a lover. Her picture had been usurped by an ad network in the employ of a third-party application developer, which she believes was a quiz app. [...]
Facebook has a program for advertisers called Social Ads, under which it may show ads to your friends with your picture included if you have associated yourself with the advertiser by, say, becoming a fan of its Facebook page.
You can choose not to become an endorser of these products or companies by making tweaks to your privacy settings. Hover your mouse over “Settings” and choose “Privacy Settings,” then “News Feed and Wall.” Then click “Facebook Ads” tab, which will take you to asetting for “Appearance in Facebook Ads” where you can select “No one.”
You can’t do anything to stop unscrupulous apps, or the ad networks many of them use to make money, other than to avoid using third-party apps or remove the ones you have from your profile. Certainly, you ought to consider staying away from apps with a spammy patina -– and there are a few –- as they simply may not be worthy of your trust. Facebook shares quite a bit of data about you and your friends with app developers –- a situation that has been protested by online-privacy advocates -– and you should keep that in mind when deciding which apps to let onto your pages.
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