Marketing companies mining user social media concerns about privacy from taking photos

According to U.S. media reports, most users of popular photo-sharing sites like Instagram, Flickr and Pinterest know that anyone can see their holiday photos if they are publicly shared. But they may not know that a new digital marketing company is searching, scanning, storing, and using these photos separately to provide a reference for big brand advertisers.

Some marketing companies use software to scan photos-for example, a person holding a photo of a Coca-Cola cola-to identify the brand logo, the person in the photo is smiling, and the scene. This data allows businesses to send targeted advertising or market research.

And some companies keep photos on their servers for months to show the latest trends. But some companies violate the lax rules for sharing services for photo storage.

These start-ups are raising concerns about how photo-sharing sites can inform users about the privacy of their personal data collection practices. The treasure trove is staggering: Instagram said that 20 billion photos had been shared on its website and that users were adding about 60 million photos a day.

Web marketers can access photos that are publicly available on websites such as Instagram or Pinterest through a set of software codes called Application design Interfaces (APIs). On the other hand, these photo-sharing sites want these brands to eventually spend their money advertising in them.

These sites do not explicitly inform users that their photos may be browsed or downloaded for marketing purposes, the Privacy protection group said. Privacy experts say many users may not want to recommend anything in the photos, such as their jeans or beer bottles on their side tables.

Common Sense Media Vice President Lupovitz (Joni Lupovitz), a child privacy protection organization, says this is an area that may be suitable for commercial development and predatory marketing, because you happen to be in a place or captured in a certain image, You may not know that this can be used to build your profile online.

In recent years, start-ups have been searching for tweets and other social media postings to search for key words that show brand trends or popularity. The image-mining market is even more new, and may be more aggressive, because photos inspire more emotion and are sometimes interpreted in different ways than words.

In addition to identifying images, some API partners use a program called caching that downloads photos to their servers. One of the more common uses of caching is to build a marketing campaign around a user with a specific label.

Photo-sharing sites do not mention "caching" in their privacy policies, and the rules for how long digital marketing companies can store photos on their servers are different. For example, the Tumblr requires a photo cache period of three days, while Instagram indicates a "reasonable period" for the cache period.