Parents outraged as Meta uses photos of schoolgirls in ads targeting man | Hacker News Reader

Parents outraged as Meta uses photos of schoolgirls in ads targeting man

theguardian.com

92 pointsmindracer20 comments

Parents shared photos of their daughters in school uniforms:

>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”.

Data’s lookin’ uncomfortable:

>With 267 followers, her Instagram account usually had modest reach but the post of her child attracted nearly 7,000 views, 90% from non-followers, half of whom were aged over 44 and 90% of whom were men.

There's some amount of evidence that social media amplifies our worst tendencies. How we collectively decide to normalise this is another matter. And even if your account is set to private, as a fellow parent, why are you posting your underage children's uniform online…?

Ersatz group chat? Grandma & the cousins will see it there, and your bestie.

(Obviously this is such a bad idea.)

I find it sort of hilarious that Facebook's only response to this is "well the pictures were not against the community standards". As if that were the problem.

After all the public quotes from Zuckerberg and all the things the company did, I'm not willing to entertain benefit of the doubt anymore for this kind of stuff.

While I'm no Meta supporter it seems possible there was more to their response than what made it into this article.

What doubt?

Pictures were disproportionately popular with a demographic. Algorithm decided to use them to promote to a member of that demographic.

You may or may not think that's OK, but where's the doubt about what actually happened?

> With 267 followers, her Instagram account usually had modest reach but the post of her child attracted nearly 7,000 views, 90% from non-followers, half of whom were aged over 44 and 90% of whom were men.

Not uncommon at all. I'd also say her parents are prolly millennials, the supposedly "tech fixer" generation. Next, if their (young women) IG account is a business account they know their metics/audience... You can type in literally any name and an attractive women is going to be the first result on search. Go see who follows their public profile and it'll bear out the quoted metrics above. Finally, this is almost all IG is

If you’re spending your very limited lifespan and brain power working for these guys, you are the problem. I don’t care that they’re giving you a lot of money.

Totally agree.

Will the products please stop complaining.

it accepts the terms in the EULA or it gets the hose

I do wish they’d finally understand…

> 13-year-old ... schoolgirls in short skirts with either bare legs or stockings

why would one post these in the first place?

Because you're telling your friends that Susie is going back to school starting year N, and that's the uniform Susie wears to school, because the school requires it. If I drive down the nearest arterial street to my house at the right time of the day, I'll see probably 100 girls in essentially that uniform on their way to or from several different schools.

Now, given that that uniform is fetish wear on porn sites, you could argue that maybe the schools should stop requiring it. It's not even the biggest among the many reasons you should be making that argument, actually. But the reason for posting the pictures is pretty obvious.

Of course, but why post it publicly? I personally keep all my accounts private even though I am not a 13 years old girl, so I don't get why you would expose your children like that

With or without ads, there's gonna be a certain amount of "unwanted attention", if it's publicly available

FTA: "One mother said her account was set to private, but the posts were automatically cross-posting to Threads where they were visible."

With as convoluted as Meta's privacy pages are and how scattered all the settings are, this would be a super easy mistake to make. I could definitely believe that that mother may not have even known what Threads is, much less that her photos were being automatically cross-posted.

> 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.

If you’re prone to say “you should have known better” about people who use Meta’s products, remember this next time. Remember that most people are not geeks like us, they don’t know that Zuckerberg called them “dumb fucks” for trusting him and every day acts accordingly. Inform them, don’t judge.

I'm a geek and I still find Meta's privacy pages one of the most complex pieces of configuration out there. Outrageous for sure.

They probably thought the man they were advertising to was in Japan, where this kind of thing is par for the course.

It's the most sickening thing I've heard in relation to Ad targeting and exploitation by tech companies in a long time. There is a lot of bad stuff going on but this tops it. And they justified it. They said because its public data in adult accounts its totally fine. This is completely incorrect. They point to the terms and conditions but where is the honour, where is the moral decency. It doesn't exist. People used to say delete Facebook. Now I say boycot Meta.

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