Signing Away Our Lives on Facebook

When british columbia resident Deborah Douez signed up for a Facebook account, she didn’t expect that she’d end up going to court against the social-media giant. In 2012, she was told by a friend that her name and photo were showing up in Facebook ads promoting a company that sponsors competitive obstacle mud races, and the friend was wondering if Douez was working for that company.
 
But Douez wasn’t. All she had done was “like” the company’s Facebook page, the way countless other users do every day. Facebook was using her name and picture as part of a feature it had rolled out the previous year called “Sponsored Stories.” In effect, Douez’s identity was being used to help with an online sales pitch. “I was kind of shocked, because I had liked the page, but it didn’t mean that I was endorsing them,” she says. “It’s one thing to like something and quite another to then support it in a way that’s commercial in nature.”

https://thewalrus.ca/signing-away-our-lives-on-facebook/

-Bill