ASK DLS: ad using photo was from a third party app, is Facebook off the hook?

Late last night I posted about the infamous "hey that's my wife advertising a singles site" screenshot that Cheryl Smith blog shared on her blog.

Hold the phone, says Facebook. That was an embedded ad in a third-party application. As AllAboutFacebook rightly points out, I got that part wrong:

The information used for the photos were scraped while accessing Facebook applications by a third-party ad network that most likely violated Facebook's terms of service. It's a serious problem and one that I've highlighted many times.

Facebook's David Swain has informed me that the uproar has led Facebook to disable two ad networks. He also took the time to offer some clarification:

These ads are not from Facebook but we are concerned about any potential threat to our users' experience. We recently had deceptive ads removed from a number of apps and prohibited two entire advertising networks from providing services to applications on Facebook Platform because they were not compliant with our policies and failed to correct their advertising practices.

We are continuing to investigate to make sure ads that violate our policies stay off Facebook and may take further action against developers who host the ads.[...]Any ads you currently see doing this are coming from third-party ad networks and are only running within the canvas page of an application, which is controlled by third party developers rather than Facebook.

Ok, so Facebook isn't directly responsible. However, it's still their platform that allows the third party app developers to access your photos.

While it might lessen the sting, I still find it a little offputting that a developer would be allowed to access content I upload in this way. It's clearly a situation that Facebook needs to sort out once and for all, or it's just going to cause more controversy later.

What do you think? Sound off in the comments!

Tags: askdls, facebook