Facebook: "Misleading Rumors" About Ads

Sometime recently this message began popping up whenever a user visits the Facebook Ads section of their Facebook Privacy Settings. It’s dressed up to be some sort of reassurance to paranoid individuals, but to me it looks like a blatant insult to anyone aware of the original issue, as well as a statement calling myself and many other people liars.

I cannot stress enough how offensive I find this. Once again, Facebook is basically omitting any sort of direct acknowledgement of the fact that they ever allowed open-access of user-data to these third parties in the first place.

The old options page has also been replaced with a shoddy and confusing explanation of how the ads work:

Notice the wording has changed considerably. Where the option used to say “Appearance in Facebook Ads”, it now says “Show my social actions in Facebook ads to” followed by the drop down menu (which is still not showing up for some firefox users, with or without any sort of adblocking enabled).

If You Don’t Like History, Just Rewrite It.

Does Facebook truly believe that by ignoring the fact that users’ pictures were allowed to be used in ads without their informed consent, that they can make us think it never happened? Changing the settings page and throwing a reassuring banner on it, alluding to phantoms who apparently run around the Internet crying wolf, all in some vain hope that nobody will notice? Users who have been alerted by friends (or lovers) of their faces appearing on ads may feel a bit provoked at the very thought. I don’t believe they’d be overreacting, either.

It’s all well and good if Facebook has decided that allowing third party advertisers to show users’ profile pictures in their ads was simply too risky, but acting as though it never happened is unconscionable in my opinion. According to their official blog, the ads were entirely outside their control, and it was only recently that they discovered and began rectifying the situation. I still find this hard to believe. I’d much rather they come out and apologize for what has happened, and admit their own faults where relevant.