I like Facebook. I use it every day, throughout the day. It’s helped me keep in touch with friends I don’t see often enough, and it’s helped me reconnect with people I haven’t seen in a long time. It’s a great platform for sharing photos and news pieces and fun information and thoughts with a wide circle of contacts. Before Facebook, I was more likely to copy things and mail them to friends. That was time-consuming, expensive and, well, a drag.

I don’t even mind the ads on Facebook. In fact, I like the ads on Facebook, because they’re built around relevancy. How did I find out last year that Bryan Ferry would be playing the Hollywood Bowl? Through a Facebook ad — one that was directed at me because I put “Bryan Ferry” as one of my likes and interests. In general, I don’t want ads that I don’t want — I call these “interruption marketing,” because they seek to interrupt me. But without permission-oriented ads, I may not have known about the local appearances of Devo, Brian Eno, Louis C.K. and others I’ve gone to.

And I don’t mind Facebook trying to find ever more ways to make money. They’re going to have to. It’s a free service for my use, and they have nowhere near the revenue stream or the cash reserves to properly arm them in their little tripartite war with Apple and Google. I don’t want to start paying for Facebook — and that’s been rumored as a potential new revenue stream — and I don’t want to lose Facebook either.

All of that said, though, here’s something I don’t want them to do: I don’t want them to start using my profile pic on ads on their system. I didn’t mind them saying that “Lee Wochner likes this” with their thumbs-up sign on some of their ads; that seems fair, because I do indeed like those things, and because I’m not ashamed of people knowing that, and because, again, the system is free. But I don’t want my profile picture attached to it, and I don’t want them allowing third-party apps to use my profile pic either. Luckily (or, perhaps, for legal reasons), there’s a way to disable that. Here’s a little further background, and here’s what to do about it:

On May 25th, Facebook will start using your photos in ads that will appear on the profile of your contacts. It’s legal and was mentioned to you when you opened an account. To prevent this do the following: Home -> Account Settings -> Facebook Ads (Bottom left) -> Ads shown by third parties -> Edit third party advert settings, then choose “No one” in the list and save the changes.

While you’re at it, you can also change your setting to disallow the “[your name] likes this” setting as well.

OR — and I’ve thought about this — if you’re inclined to play games with the folks at Facebook and their advertisers who are supporting the system that, again, we’re all using for free, you could put an objectionable (but still passable) image up as your profile picture so that whenever it says “[you] like this” people will see, say, Adolf Hitler and think twice about buying what’s being advertising. Of course, they’ll also think twice about remaining your friend — either for real or on Facebook.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012 at 9:50 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.