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185

Parents outraged as Meta uses photos of schoolgirls in ads targeting man (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 4 days ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

32 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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”.

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[–] InevitableList@beehaw.org 10 points 2 days ago

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."