Self-portrait, create value by marketing company

Most picture-sharing sites, such as Instagram,flickr and Pinterest, know that if their vacation photos are set up for public sharing, then anyone can see them.

But they may be shocked if they know that some digital marketing companies are searching, scanning, storing and recycling these images for use by big-name advertisers.

Many companies, such as Ditto Labs, use software to scan photos, such as a photo of someone holding a jar of Coca-Cola to identify the logo, to determine whether the person is smiling, and the scene information. Marketers can use data to publish targeted ads or conduct marketing research.

Other companies, such as Piqora, have stored their images on their servers for months to showcase trends. Although the picture storage rules are loose enough, some companies still violate the rules.

The start-up companies ' actions have raised new privacy concerns. The number of pictures is huge: Instagram says their services have already shared 20 billion images, and users are uploading 60 million new images every day.

Digital marketers use APIs (the application interface) to get photos that are publicly shared Instagram or Pinterest. These photo-sharing sites also hope that these brands will eventually be able to pay for advertising on their websites.

Privacy regulators said the sites did not tell users clearly that their images were scanned or downloaded and used for marketing. Privacy experts say many users do not want to advertise the jeans they wear in photos or a bottle of beer on the table next to them.

A screenshot of the Ditto Labs website shows a bunch of photos scanned for various brands. The site filters photos by category, such as beer.

"This area has been used for commercial development and predatory marketing," said Johnny Hickenlooper, vice chairman of the Common Sense Media Children's Privacy defense group. If just because you happen to be somewhere or taking a picture, you may not understand that this can be used to create your profile online. 」

In recent years, startups have started digging through tweets or social-networking keywords that reflect brand popularity and Word-of-mouth. The image mining market is newer and potentially more diffuse, because photos reflect people's moods, sometimes easier to read than words.

Instagram,flickr and Pinterest are big picture-sharing sites, both of which say they have fully informed users that publicly-released photos will be shared by partners and will be penalized if outside developers violate the rules. Photos that the user has marked as private or not shared will not be made public to marketers.

There is no law banning the public photo-batch analysis because users upload photos for anyone to browse and download. The Federal Trade Commission does require web sites to be transparent about sharing user data with third parties, but the rules can be interpreted in many ways, especially with the emergence of new business models. Officials have punished companies that violate their privacy policies.

The US Federal Trade Commission declined to comment.

The privacy policies of these image websites are enforced in accordance with the law and make commitments to consumers. Although the statement is different, but did not clearly express how the third party to use the user upload photos.

Instagram (Facebook's company), for example, has a privacy policy that points its 200 million users to a file that the developer prescribes. Pinterest and Yahoo's Flickr have no explicit reference to third-party developers in their privacy policy. Other popular image sites, such as Twitter and another Yahoo site, Tumblr warn users that they may share private content with third parties.

Although Facebook is one of the largest picture-sharing sites, most users have access to their photos, so outside developers cannot dig into the value of these images. Developers typically use Facebook's API to import user avatars without marketing.

A Instagram spokesman said their collaboration with developers did not change the picture owner, nor did it change the proper protection for community security. Flickr says they will take steps to prevent external developers from scanning the site's images in bulk.

Pinterest says their APIs only provide public information to partners to help their customers understand their content.

Tumblr and Twitter spokesmen declined to comment.

Yuris Polontsky, director of the Privacy Future Forum (established by Facebook and other technology companies), says users should assume that if their photos are public, companies will scan them for market research.

But the rise of image scanning technology has led people to inadvertently be photographed offline behavior photos as material for more personalized marketing, says Peter Eckersley, director of technology projects at the Electronic Frontier Fund.

In addition, the software scans images of human faces or objects in the technology so new, most of the Web site's privacy policy has not mentioned this technology.

Advertisers such as Kraft have paid Ditto Labs to find trademarks of their products in photos of Tumblr and Instagram. The software in Cambridge, Massachusetts, monitors consumer behavior, such as what people like to drink when eating macaroni and cheese, and whether they smile in photos. Ditto Labs classifies users based on photo content, such as "sports fans" and "cargo".

Kraft may use this data for store sales of specific products, advertising, or better positioning online users. David Ross, who set up Ditto Labs in 2012, says his image-recognition software will someday allow consumers to "buy" their friends ' own photos. Kraft did not respond.

Ditto Labs can also offer advertisers a way to locate specific users via photos uploaded to Twitter by users, but most advertisers don't want to do this because it makes users feel horrible.

Ross admits most photo uploads don't know that their photos will be scanned for market analysis. He said that picture sharing sites should take more steps to educate users so they can better control their photos.

In addition to image recognition, some API collaborators use "caching" technology to download pictures to their servers. The most common way to use caching is to create a marketing campaign around a user uploading photos and categorize them with specific tags.

Companies do not mention caching in their privacy policy, and developers have different time to store photos on their own servers. For example, the TUMBLR limit cache time is 3 days, and Instagram is within a reasonable time.

Some developers have violated the rules of the picture-sharing site. Last month Pinterest from a Wall Street Journal survey that Piqora, one of their seven business API partners, set up in May this year violated the picture-use policy.

Piqora is a marketing analytics start-up company based in San Mateo, Calif., which helps apparel manufacturer Fossil to track the most popular products in their own products and competitions. This violates the rules of Pinterest. Pinterest rules prohibit partners from using photos other than their clients.

A spokesman for Pinterest said Pinterest, aware of the violation, asked Piqora to end the irregularities and planned to begin regular reviews of its partners. Fossil did not respond.

Sharad Velma, co-founder and chief executive of Piqora, said he had removed the ability to watch competing pictures in the charts. His colleague clarified his company's policy of caching photos from Instagram. Velma said that they would now delete the photos on the server within 120 days, rather than saving them indefinitely.

"We may be looking for new ways to optimize our software beyond caching," Velma said. 」