Yet Another Reason I Do Not Use Facebook

[vakkotaur]

Co-opting for advertising. Permission? What's that?It seems about every time I hear about Facebook it's something like this. While pressure might eventually rescind the no-permission-needed bit, it seems that not once has FB done the right thing and made stuff opt-IN from the beginning. Right now they don't even have an opt-out (the thing of

Comments

[nefaria]

I'm on it but I have yet to make a post. I just spy on my friends instead. It seems very irritating somehow, the way Twitter is (visit someone's Twitter page and you'll see a screen full of @ spam and virtually no meaningful content).

[yakko]

Using the "visit some user's page" test, it can be successfully argued that "meaningful content" and "Twitter" are largely antonyms.

[keeper1st]

All they're doing is reposting what you've already written, visible to people who've already seen you write it, but it's now put in the right-side column of ads that nobody looks at anyway.

If they were taking stuff you wrote and using it in ads visible to people who hadn't already seen your post, or people you don't even know, that would be a different story.

As it is, you've already made the endorsement of the products to your friends; now your friends are just going to see it again in their ads column. No biggie.

That's a lot different than Flickr recently allowing all pictures to be usable in advertising unless the posters specifically set a flag. (Thus a young American girl showed up on bus stop ads in Australia without her or her parents' knowledge.)

[vakkotaur]

It still feels wrong. One did not say, "Go ahead and publish this for your gain." Less skeevy is not not skeevy. I notice that a company pays for this, but no mention is made of any payment to the one whose words are being appropriated. Entity A takes entity B's work A's gain without compensation to or agreement of B. Thats' theft.

I suspect the first thing I would do if I found any of my stuff used that way would be to immediately rescind it. If I could edit it, even better, especially if they link rather than cut & paste. Any company doing this is just begging for the black eye they are bound to get from doing so.

Also, this is just one more item in a sad history of FB doing things of this nature. Had it been explicitly opt-in it would be no big deal. In fact, it would indicate that FB finally, at long last, started to get things right. As it is, I look forward to Facebook getting the same (lack of) respect that MySpace does now. Facebook has truly earned it.