San Francisco June 24, (TNS): Your Facebook profile picture is intensely personal. So how would you feel if you saw your face on another profile? It’s a commonly reported problem on the social network, and the firm is addressing the issue — trying out new protections first in India.
Starting Wednesday, Facebook is introducing new privacy tools to users there, where the social network has an estimated 166 million users. The tools will add further protection to a user’s profile pictures, as women in that country have reported that others have repurposed their image without their permission.
“People copy that photo and upload it in a different place as their photo or on their timeline,” said Aarati Soman, a product manager at Facebook who concentrates on safety for women in emerging markets.
The problem of online impersonation is a big one — ask anyone who’s ever been “catfished,” or found that their face was being used to trick others into becoming “friends,” or forming an online relationship with an impersonator.Profile pictures are public by default for all Facebook users, meaning that they are the most vulnerable to being reused without permission — often on other sites, at which point it becomes very difficult to take them down.
Facebook is not the only social media network to face this issue, and impersonations violate many networks’ terms of service. But others have not taken technical steps to prevent it.
Online privacy experts said there is no central database recording how often online impersonation cases are reported in the United States. Facebook declined to give specific numbers on how many reports of impersonations it receives.
The general problem of fake accounts, however, is widespread. Facebook said in 2012 it reported that 83 million of its accounts were fake, though it’s not clear how many of those were impersonations. The company continues to delete tens of thousands of fake accounts worldwide.
In India, the shock of finding one’s face attributed to another person’s account or a fake version has prevented many users — particularly women — from uploading profile pictures that include their image at all, Somon said.
So Facebook is taking steps to make it a little harder to steal someone else’s profile picture in India, through an additional privacy option. Using this option will put a blue border and shield around someone’s picture. On the technical side, Facebook is making it impossible for someone to use right-click (or long-press, on a mobile phone) to copy a protected profile picture. In addition, the company is making it impossible to take a screenshot of someone’s profile picture if they’ve opted into the protection — just on the Android platform, for now.
Users may also not tag anyone in someone else’s profile picture, which previously allowed it to be shared without permission.To discourage other ways that impersonators may try and steal a profile picture — such as taking a picture of a picture — Facebook is introducing a way to overlay your profile picture with a pattern. In tests, this deterred 75 percent of would-be impersonators from grabbing a picture. Indian users can choose from a handful of patterns, inspired by local textiles.
Of course, these changes only protect a subset of Facebook users. Those in the U.S. and other countries must rely on other means. In the U.S., California and Texas have passed laws specifically outlawing online impersonation. And it is, of course, explicitly banned by Facebook’s own terms of service — though the anecdotal prevalence of the problem suggests that may not be much of a deterrence.
For the rest of us, the best option is to set your profile photo to a more private setting, which at least lets you limit who can see comments, likes and other reactions. Or, if you’re very nervous about it, you could take a page from the playbook of Indian women and use profile pictures that include your face.
Making it more difficult to appropriate someone’s Facebook profile picture without permission is a good step, said Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami and anti-harassment advocate. Facebook could go further and use its photo recognition technology, she said, to flag instances where this has happened.
