[Cthulhu_]

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...

[PakG1]

I understand that I give them permission. That's partly why I'm not a producer of content on those platforms, though I'll consume now and then. But I'll rarely produce text (other than usually a happy birthday now and then), and I'll never produce photos.

But what about the people in my photographs, whether on purpose or not? Did they give permission? That's the part that Meta doesn't really want to address.

[slumberlust]

If car mfgs can engross passengers in ToS they may never see; I'd guess yes. At least until someone challenges it.

[smalltorch]

Those are incredible terms that no one read.

[Groxx]

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.

[greggsy]

HN maybe?

[victorbjorklund]

HN terms: "By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed."

[digitaltrees]

Sites need to include this language to protect themselves from malicious law suits. But they don’t need to actually do stupid, disrespectful stuff with that power.

Remember the Zuck quote when asked why people gave him their data: “they trust me, dumb f*cks”.

When someone shows you who they are, trust them. He should be banned from having user data.

[endofreach]

> Sites need to include this language to protect themselves from malicious law suits

No, they do not. They do need to have people believe they do need to.

[DANmode]

[flagged]

[AlienRobot]

Do you really expect us to read the terms of service of the service we use?!

[bluefirebrand]

I would suggest that the services expect that we don't, which is why they are comfortable putting absolutely anything they want in the terms

[iinnPP]

If you want to complain afterwards, yes.

[acdha]

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.

[alex1138]

I get sad because people liked Insta pre-Zuckerberg. Like, it was growing. People seem to couch it in terms of "They had 12 employees. They weren't going anywhere". But they were. Zuckerberg just wanted to enlargen his war chest

I refuse to sign up for an Insta. I will not acquiesce to 'lol we're going to put a login wall on every page'

[like_any_other]

> If you don't want this, delete your facebook account

All that will happen is this term or similar will appear in some other "contract" of adhesion. Your bank? Your motherboard's EULA? Paypal or LLM vendor terms? Your phone OS/ISP? Your car? Anywhere and everywhere where some necessity of modern life is provided by a faceless multinational corporation.

If you don't want this, organize and lobby against it politically. That's what corporations do when they want to screw us over, and it's working great for them. Is the act-as-an-isolated-mere-consumer approach working great for us?

[rootusrootus]

> 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]

"respect your choice" sounds like it means something but doesn't mean something.

[bryanrasmussen]

respect your choice may mean something if a court decides.

[fweimer]

I think you got it backwards. Wouldn't it be way worse if they used your likeness for advertising to your friends? Compared to random people who don't know you?

[cwillu]

Funny, because I got a payout last year from facebook settling a class action suit about their use of my and others' likeness in their fucking sponsored stories.

[rrgok]

I give you the permission, but license cost for using my things is 30% of the revenue.

[bryanrasmussen]

I wonder if terms and conditions vary between jurisdictions. I would guess so.

[Xunjin]

They can definitely be questioned in courts.

[bryanrasmussen]

Yes, but let us suppose I am a big company.

I have lawyers make up terms and conditions that are really great for me, but which might cause real problems in some specific jurisdiction. Do I serve two terms and conditions or just one and hope I don't get in trouble.

I think once I'm big enough and have expensive lawyers might as well craft the terms appropriate to areas.

But now gets tricky in area A I can say "We have the right to change these terms and conditions unilaterally at any time we wish and you will be bound by the new conditions"

Now someone in area A moves to area B where terms and conditions are not as great for my company, and where you are not allowed to change terms and conditions unilaterally. Maybe I change terms for A to B immediately when they move to B so I don't get problems. But now they move out of B back to A, I probably have to ask them to agree to A conditions again.

Anyway, it is funny wondering just how nefarious these companies are with the terms and conditions.

[pavel_lishin]

> 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!

[pbhjpbhj]

To be fair it seems like it should be equally valid in contract law.

[hmry]

I can confirm it works exactly as well as putting "everything belongs to its original owners, no copyright intended" in your youtube video description

[steve1977]

This made me laugh and cry at the same time...

[realusername]

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"

[jubilee33]

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?

[vee-kay]

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/