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”.
Thats the same vibe as: Don’t drive your kids to school, you might get hit by a drunk driver. Meta will take any image, per previous claims, they don’t care if it was public or not
which is why you don’t put it online in the first place, as the user said…
It’s moreso like asking the drunk driver to take your kids to school
No. You ate doing something legal in good faith and the other person is being devious.
Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right.
Nope. The poster is choosing to put the PII online, and cannot guarantee privacy. In IT Security, “How do you know” is the most powerful phrase; and for Facebook/Meta/etc, you just don’t.
This is a fundamental rule since childhood (“If you’re coming home late from band practice, stay in a group because of the cougar”) and I’m not sure where you missed it.