5 ms·

Didn't Facebook do this years and years ago? Yes, 2013: https://mashable.com/archive/facebook-ads-photo#ggcKnNfAUaqy https://mashable.com/archive/facebook-ads-

Didn't Facebook do this years and years ago? Yes, 2013: https://mashable.com/archive/facebook-ads-photo#ggcKnNfAUaqy 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-information/ https://www.facebook.com/privacy/dialog/delete-your-informat...

pavel_lishin 4mo ago
> 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!
- realusername 4mo ago
  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"
- steve1977 4mo ago
  This made me laugh and cry at the same time...
- pbhjpbhj 4mo ago
  To be fair it seems like it should be equally valid in contract law.
- hmry 4mo ago
  I can confirm it works exactly as well as putting "everything belongs to its original owners, no copyright intended" in your youtube video description
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
smalltorch 4mo ago
Those are incredible terms that no one read.
- acdha 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    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'
    - cindyllm 4mo ago
      [dead]
- Groxx 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    HN maybe?
    - victorbjorklund 4mo ago
      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."
rootusrootus 4mo ago
> 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 4mo ago
  "respect your choice" sounds like it means something but doesn't mean something.
  - bryanrasmussen 4mo ago
    respect your choice may mean something if a court decides.
- fweimer 4mo ago
  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?
vee-kay 4mo ago
FYI, Meta earns billions by showing scam ads. https://qz.com/consumer-federation-america-sues-meta-scam-ads-facebook-instagram-042226 https://qz.com/consumer-federation-america-sues-meta-scam-ad... https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/ 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-access-each-others-keystroke-data/ 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/ https://leehopkins.com/meta-data-abuse-revealed/
jubilee33 4mo ago
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?
bryanrasmussen 4mo ago
I wonder if terms and conditions vary between jurisdictions. I would guess so.
- Xunjin 4mo ago
  They can definitely be questioned in courts.
  - bryanrasmussen 4mo ago
    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.
like_any_other 4mo ago
> 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?
PakG1 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  If car mfgs can engross passengers in ToS they may never see; I'd guess yes. At least until someone challenges it.
rrgok 4mo ago
I give you the permission, but license cost for using my things is 30% of the revenue.
cwillu 4mo ago
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.

pavel_lishin 4mo ago

> 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!

realusername 4mo ago
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"
steve1977 4mo ago
This made me laugh and cry at the same time...
pbhjpbhj 4mo ago
To be fair it seems like it should be equally valid in contract law.
hmry 4mo ago
I can confirm it works exactly as well as putting "everything belongs to its original owners, no copyright intended" in your youtube video description

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

smalltorch 4mo ago

Those are incredible terms that no one read.

acdha 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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'
  - cindyllm 4mo ago
    [dead]
Groxx 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  HN maybe?
  - victorbjorklund 4mo ago
    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."

rootusrootus 4mo ago

> 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 4mo ago
"respect your choice" sounds like it means something but doesn't mean something.
- bryanrasmussen 4mo ago
  respect your choice may mean something if a court decides.
fweimer 4mo ago
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?

vee-kay 4mo ago

FYI, Meta earns billions by showing scam ads. https://qz.com/consumer-federation-america-sues-meta-scam-ads-facebook-instagram-042226 https://qz.com/consumer-federation-america-sues-meta-scam-ad... https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/ 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-access-each-others-keystroke-data/ 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/ https://leehopkins.com/meta-data-abuse-revealed/

jubilee33 4mo ago

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?

bryanrasmussen 4mo ago

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

Xunjin 4mo ago
They can definitely be questioned in courts.
- bryanrasmussen 4mo ago
  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.

like_any_other 4mo ago

> 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?

PakG1 4mo ago

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 4mo ago
If car mfgs can engross passengers in ToS they may never see; I'd guess yes. At least until someone challenges it.

rrgok 4mo ago

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

cwillu 4mo ago

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.