anything you can do, i can do meta

Facebook Reassures.

So, today I noticed people were posting this message on Facebook:

Starting today, Facebook will start using your photos in ads that will appear on the profile page of your contacts. If you want to prevent this from happening…

…followed by instructions on how to adjust your privacy settings. On the relevant settings page, I find this little notice:

Worried about privacy? Your photos are safe.There have been misleading rumors recently about the use of your photos in ads. Don’t believe them. These rumors were related to third-party applications, and not ads shown by Facebook. Get the whole story at theFacebook Blog, or check out the Help Center.

But if, curious, you read further, you’ll find this:

Ads shown by third party applications

Facebook does not give third party applications or ad networks the right to use your name or picture in ads. If this is allowed in the future, this setting will govern the usage of your information.

Charming. So, don’t worry at all about your photos being scraped up into advertisements. We don’t allow that. But we might in the future. So, worry then, but don’t worry now. And if we do that - which we aren’t now! - you can control that here. It’s not lying, per se, but it’s the exact opposite of reassuring. Imagine Mint.com asking you to enter your financial services passwords with the calm reassurance that they’re definitely not selling your information to the Russian Business Network, but that if they ever do, you’ll be able to turn it off, so don’t worry. Thanks? (granted Mint might be a bad example, but whatever) Facebook doesn’t respect its users or their privacy enough to even try to make you feel better about all the information of yours they control. They know they have your social-media-addled brain by the balls anyway.