Instagram is incorporating users' photos in ads for Meta Glasses | Hacker News Reader

Instagram is incorporating users' photos in ads for Meta Glasses

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357 pointsnotRobot147 comments

Didn't Facebook do this years and years ago?

Yes, 2013: 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-informat...

> 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!

This made me laugh and cry at the same time...

To be fair it seems like it should be equally valid in contract law.

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"

I can confirm it works exactly as well as putting "everything belongs to its original owners, no copyright intended" in your youtube video description

Those are incredible terms that no one read.

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.

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'

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.

HN maybe?

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."

Sites need to include this language to protect themselves from malicious law suits. But they don’t need to actually do stupid, disrespectful stuff with that power.

Remember the Zuck quote when asked why people gave him their data: “they trust me, dumb f*cks”.

When someone shows you who they are, trust them. He should be banned from having user data.

> Sites need to include this language to protect themselves from malicious law suits

No, they do not. They do need to have people believe they do need to.

[flagged]

Do you really expect us to read the terms of service of the service we use?!

If you want to complain afterwards, yes.

I would suggest that the services expect that we don't, which is why they are comfortable putting absolutely anything they want in the terms

> 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?

"respect your choice" sounds like it means something but doesn't mean something.

respect your choice may mean something if a court decides.

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?

FYI, Meta earns billions by showing scam ads.

https://qz.com/consumer-federation-america-sues-meta-scam-ad...

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-...

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/

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?

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

They can definitely be questioned in courts.

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.

> 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?

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.

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

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

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.

Many years ago (back when Facebook still had sidebar ads), my sister was presented with a dating ad for "Hot Christian Singles" accompanied by a photo of our brother.

It was hilarious, but also mind-boggling. In what scenario would pulling in a friend's profile photo create a useful ad?

> In what scenario would pulling in a friend's profile photo create a useful ad?

Exactly in the scenario you just described. You still remember it and you are actively talking about it years after the fact.

wouldn't "useful ad" imply either 1) clicking through and buying the product or service, or else 2) building up a positive brand association to help increase sales later?

remembering an advert correlates but is different to it being valuable.

Yeah I remember some studies showed this with overly sexy ads. They were very memorable to the audience but all they remembered was hot chicks, they couldn't recall the product.

But it didn't bring clicks to the website nor goodwill toward the company.

No one remembers who ran the ad. Even if we did, it would only be in a negative light due to a weird and off-putting advertising approach.

Don't get hung up on this specific example of the dating ad.

There's a difference between awareness campaigns and click / conversion campaigns and if there's some ads for a garden chair and your friend is sitting on it you'll definitely remember it more than some random model. Or clothes that are advertised on your body. Not saying that's the future we want, but it would definitely work for a while.

That doesn't come across as any less creepy to the average user: "They stole my friend's likeness to sell me a lawn chair" still feels slimy.

I'm sure the real reason is that Facebook added a poorly thought out feature to their marketing tools around that time, and someone just decided to try it out.

All this talk about how creepy Facebook is and yet most people use it? If Facebook was that creepy it wouldn't be a trillion dollar company. So they saw a "creepy" ad. They went "haha" or whatever and then kept using it. I mean how would you even quantify that the feature was "poorly thought out" or "slimy" at that point? If that was the case why didn't the user log off and never come back? Then at least Facebook would have a signal to work with.

Sometimes people really miss the forest for the trees. Most people actually like Facebook. If you can't wrap your head around that you have to accept you are distinct from the typical consumer. A trillion dollars is not made by appealing to the margins. If Facebook really sucked so bad everyone would log off.

Instead of another boring Facebook sucks comment why don't you ask your sibling why they didn't stop interacting with the website after that? You would probably learn more about the world doing that than trying to speculate about marketing tool features at a company you don't work for.

Sounds like the viewers were highly unlikely to have clicked through. Cost the advertiser a view but lost the conversion.

Useful ad for Facebook. They made money on it. The advertiser didn't.

If the viewers don't click on facebook, advertisers would stop advertising on facebook.

but lot of clicks doesnt happen because of the content

Many people want to date their own friends? Seeing your friend is on the site would show it's okay to use?

This is a ridiculous argument that just because someone still remembers something means it was a good advertising strategy. This is partly why advertising sucks. The correct metric in this case would be did the user actually go on the date with the said person or at least initiated the conversation. In this person's case, very likely not. So the strategy is dumb, ridiculous and laughable but not useful or good in any sense.

You seem ignorant of how money is made in these situations. The money is already made way before anyone ever goes on an actual date. Therefore the people showing you the ads are still incentivized to show the ad.

If you thought about things more clearly you would also realize that a platform that tried to measure something more like "how did the date actually go" would be even more dystopian. You want an algorithm to start pricing in the cost of you falling in love? If a date goes amazing should the software send you an additional invoice? People who use these apps are already essentially outsourcing interpersonal relationships. How far do you want to take that? The lack of precision is not "dumb, ridiculous and laughable" it's actually a saving grace.

Zero people in the process of creating that ad said "we'll suggest people date their siblings, it'll be so memorable"

That is absolutely not a success story when trying to market a Christian dating platform.

It's about the "in which scenario" question of the OP, not this dating ad in particular.

They're married now, too.

Roll tide.

I could see people clicking through to see if their friend had a dating profile, if not for the romantic interest the gossip interest.

Okay, this may actually explain it XD

Is Meta abusing its users a problem? Yes. Does the TOS allow for it? Yes. Can people decide to just create a shell account and not actually participate? Sure.

One of the real insidious problems with Instagram and to some extent Facebook is that they provide a free, low friction way for business to communicate with current or potential customers. As a result many small businesses use Instagram as replacement for a public facing website and perhaps a blog or email newsletter. Many small business in my region depend on Instagram for this purpose, its nearly universal. It helps keep you stuck in Instagram so that you can see a business' hours, menu, or special events. I guess a shell account is the answer but you're still going to have to navigate the skinner box feed.

Every time I try to create a shell account, it gets banned with no reason given. Even if it's just to follow a few influencer accounts.

Well there you go, there is no reasonable way to be a non-participant while also staying up to date on businesses that choose to use the platform.

You can't create shell account on fb/meta anymore. They will ask to turn on camera and rotate your head.

Print out a face of someone on Facebook and use that?

It’ll be obvious when you turn “their” head that it’s not real.

print out a panagram of a head, and paste it to a lampshade, or use a mannequin head and describe how you were horribly burned as a child.

U a manequin head. Add hair and moles. It mightbtake more than one try but it works. Eventually, people who make shell accounts will be declared creepy child predators, but that isn't the case, yet.

I'm not making a mannequin head to see a restaurant menu.

sounds like a business opportunity!

If the only way to interact with a business is via Facebook or Instagram, I don't interact with the business.

Unfortunately this is more of a problem for me than it is for them. I hope my position on this becomes more popular over time so that everyone can stop using spy- and adware.

Small businesses are pretty important for a number of reasons and I think if people adopted this stance it would hurt them a lot more than it would hurt Meta.

We need a Nitter for Instagram.

https://imginn.com/ or https://codeberg.org/irelephant/kittygram

you also add `kk` in front of it and it renders just the embedded content

Just stop using that cursed website

It really is that simple. “Users of company with a long track record of unethical behavior surprised at the company’s latest unethical business decision.”

I know it’s not easy for some to stop using their platform for some reason or another. That’s the point. When you use their product not because they are the best choice in a free market with options, but when you use it because you have to. Just don’t surprised when FB keeps pushing the limits.

Maybe they're not surprised, they just don't care

Yeah just done that. Hosed my Instagram account.

Even if you don't use FB, pictures of you tagged by your friends are fair game.

Dont have friends, simple as

This shouldn't really be surprising. It's very similar to what they did ~1.5 year ago when they started to use users' photos to promote Meta AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615538

I feel like having an account on a Meta site is today’s equivalent of being a smoker.

There isn't better analogy. I hope it spreads and we will see the same effect and social pressure as smokers faced.

Vaping is the new smoking. Except you knew what was inside a cigar, while vape liquid is a generic term for anything inside a bottle.

Agreed. I rarely see smokers nowadays but I see a lot of vapers everywhere even including on public transit and kids.

Being a smoker in the 1950s maybe.

After years off of it I got back on it because living in NYC it’s a lot easier to find and get invited to events in the arts if you’re on it. I wish it weren’t so. I hate every part of it that isn’t a utility.

https://xcancel.com/venturetwins/status/2071277885646868536

"Damn, this is creepy level though & generally I’m all for ads knowing everything about me. Putting my wife’s profile pic in an ad is too much"

Presumably this reply is a joke?

Comment on that thread:

> This seems entirely counter-productive and creepy.

Apt description of Instagram in general.

Sometimes it seems like Black Mirror screenwriters work at Meta as a side hustle.

Why? Because they can, and they will.

Leaving these services looks difficult or impossible, until you do it, and the world just keeps spinning.

As if Meta glasses weren't creepy enough already.

The XKCD for this exact scenario is 14 years old.

https://xkcd.com/1150/

Some reason that strip doesn't load for me.

It is just saying that if you don't pay for something, you are the product. I think it still fits well here.

You can pay for Meta Verified. I think you'll still get banned

I'm getting very tired of this trope. Businesses need to do better. End of story

Kind of a stretch, these days can't imagine anyone that views instagram as a place to store their cherished photos also.

Yeah, and then the charging businesses start selling your stuff anyway. So really, it's the comic creator, who is naive.

Amazing we live in an age where making a fake image of someone that looks realistic enough (and for a tiny thumbnail resolution to boot) with a company that makes arguably lesser used but somewhat frontier AI models, not using said models to make these ads less intrusive, whilst still making them feel slightly personalized.

I don't know what's worse - this, or all the ads/commercials for Meta Glasses featuring Kylie Jenner, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yYQO8exxaU

Always amusing when people discover they’re paying for free services with something other than money.

https://xcancel.com/venturetwins/status/2071277885646868536

i edited it to the same url before opening as i usually do for twitter urls so that i can see the full conversation without being logged into twitter.

for some reason the url rewrote iteself to this: https://themenspiegel.click/c/de/52_merzchrupalla/?method=po...

which is a german language scam site. i have no explanation how this happened, whether it is xcancel.com doing this or something loaded from twitter that caused xcancel to do this. never seen anythin like it before, would like to know more.

btw any further reloads of the xcancel url to that tweet totally work as expected.

Throwing an additional anecdote into the bucket, this did not happen for me. Any chance you have a dodgy extension installed?

Sure you didn't just make a typo and hit a squatted domain?

did not think of that, maybe it's this. i tried a couple typos just now and holy shit most of these are registered and you land on some really dodgy shit, i.e. porn and sites that seem to try out browser exploits. did not find the scam site from earlier, but can't count it out either.

do not go to sites like xancel.com, xcancl.com, xcncl.com .. they are not safe. damn typoswatters.

Doubt. xcancel.com does not even seem to have any advertisements at all, when I disable ublock. Site seems remarkable clean, no thirdparty connections apart from a cdn. Sure you didn't type cancelx.com? Cause there something shady is going on. Otherwise, I would strongly suggest checking your extensions or system for malware.

Something similar happened to me a few years ago. my photo was used in an ad, making it look like I was selling stuff and promoting a page I’d never even clicked on... absolutely mind-blowing....

How much abuse are the users willing to take before the take action?

Possibly unlimited so long as the hot and cool people are on the platform.

Well, that took a dark turn. At this point, no one should be surprised. They've churned out a lot of movies with this plot; it was always going to happen.

The news here is that people are still using instagram.

They have two billion monthly active users worldwide. There's many parts of this world that run on Meta (WhatsApp / Instagram) for things from government communication to every business only having IG pages or doing business through it.

> "The era of ultra personalized ads has begun"

I think that's maybe a decade old by now if not more, a little late to the party I'd say

I mean, what would you expect from company with morality of tobacco and slot machines producer? This is the least evil they are doing.

This thing resurface from time to time. It's the small text you never read. In this case, small part in ridiculously and intentionally big eula.

I am surprised with the downvotes. Meta is the new tobacco corp.

Ten years ago maybe this causes outrage, but I'm not sure anyone cares in 2026 including potential customers.

I actually find this incredible, since this highlights how desperate they are to advertise these glasses

IG users were the proverbial product on this free-to-partake vanity fair since its inception.

Is there actual proof that they are doing this. Theres not much to go on in the tweet.

Besides the proof in the screenshot? What more do you want?

Do you think this user is faking it?

Yes people frequently fake screenshots on social media. I'd want either a screenshot from a credible person, reporting from a journalist, trusted blogger, company statement etc.

I'm not a journalist, but I don't think a reporter would go much further than "one user said...".

There is no need for fact checking an individual source, other than to verify the reporting is accurately representing what they said.

A credible journalist would not entertain writing a story based on a screenshot some random user posts on social media.

Well the company statement is that they say they can do this in their terms of service. It seems very plausible that Meta is doing what their TOS says they’re allowed to do.

yes, it happened to me recently.

The photo wasn't mine, but showed a profile photo of one of my facebook friends, and it had the glasses and said "On my way!"

And they have a history of doing this. And their privacy/ToS allows it.

When you don't pay for the product... YOU are the product.

Company owned by a sociopath and which has proven time and time and time again that they have no regard for your privacy does it again. It’s good to keep talking about it so that there is still some friction attached to pulling this off for Meta, but if you’re surprised at this I don’t know what to tell you.

Delete your social media and join the rest of us living free!

As horrible as it sounds.

For the median user, It really is impossible to have an alternative to instagram / whatsapp / facebook. It is so easy to live in a bubble and say I'll host my own things. but a totally different thing to have a functioning network effects machine.

why are people using these products exactly?

signing away their rights to their photos? making psychopaths filthy rich?

if the surveillance glasses are coming, these people will also have signed away the commons, which are not theirs to give away

The surveillance glasses are nearing 3rd gen.

You'd know that if you used social media /s

Important reminder that you don't belong to yourself anymore when using these "services".

Meta glasses are basically for people who do not care about privacy so this ad promotes that brand perfectly.

Its like designing bad email spam to only get the gullible leads and not the smart people who will smell foul play from miles away.

"I'm uncomfortable"

Should have read the terms and conditions

What percentage of people read those? They’re even unitelligible to the layman.

And that's how the HUMANCENTiPAD keeps growing.

Hey Siri, find the gotchas in this EULA being presented /s

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