Picture this: You and a friend are lounging on your deck. You’re holding a can of Coca-Cola. You snap a selfie, deem it worthy of the public, and post it on social media.
Soon, you start seeing Coca-Cola ads pop up ads during your Internet browsing.
You might not even notice the ads. If you do, you certainly don’t draw a connection between the picture you took and the ads you’re seeing now.
But, what if we told you that there’s a good chance there is a connection?
Marketing firms are searching for logos and products in your photos on social media. From Ellen Munro.
Douglas MacMillan and Elizabeth Dwoskin of the Wall Street Journal recently wrote a feature “exposing” a trend: Marketing companies are meticulously scanning photo-sharing social media sites to find photos of people displaying brands.
They use that information for a number of reasons:
- To create targeted ads aimed at people who have, consciously or unconsciously, displayed a brand in their photos
- To educate corporations on trends (such as, “Hey, all these kids are rolling up the cuffs on their [brand name] jeans. Let’s put that in our ads.”)
- And for plain old market research. Who is using the brands? Where are they? What are the circumstances?
At a surface level, this seems fairly innocuous. After all, these companies can only see your photos if you make them publicly available.
And yet, it’s making some people uncomfortable. Even people who know full well that their privacy settings are on “public” only picture their friends admiring their selfies — not corporations.
“Privacy watchdogs contend [that social media photo-sharing sites such as Instagram, Flickr, and Pinterest] aren’t clearly communicating to users that their images could be scanned in bulk or download for marketing purposes,” point out MacMillan and Dwoskin. “Many users may not intend to promote, say, a pair of jeans they are wearing in a photo or a bottle of beer on the table next to them, the privacy experts say.”
From a business standpoint, it’s hard to blame marketers for being interested. After all, more than 20 billion photos have been shared on Instagram, and “users are adding about 60 million” photos every single day.
Where else can marketers find 60 million snapshots of daily activities and preferences in the eyes of their consumer base?
It’s worth noting that the photo-sharing sites aren’t exactly innocent bystanders. They allow marketers to use software and special application programming interfaces to scan their sites, and in exchange, the sites “hope the brands will eventually spend money to advertise on their sites.
In the meantime, the Wall Street Journal article points out that no one is actually breaking the law. “There are no laws forbidding publicly available photos from being analyzed in bulk, because the images were posted by the user for anyone to see and download.”
Maybe there’s a happy medium—involving a whole lot of full disclosure about the way publicly shared photos can be used. And a lot of awareness about what exactly “public” sharing means. Stay tuned!