On Facebook, your face can be used in ads (without you knowing it) via SocialMedia

There's a new social media ad service posse in town, their name is Socialmedia - 'the social advertising network'. Their twist? To use your face with their ads, which they'll show to your friends -

We believe displaying friend pictures and first names within Facebook ads makes the content more relevant for you, and that you benefit from seeing relevant ads rather than being exposed to ads that may not have any meaning to you.

Flickr user Jakerome is not keen on these banners and wonders if they're even legal:

I believe what you are doing violates users rights to control their image. If a company wants to use my image to sell a product, they need to get a model release or another written contract. If you do not have a model release on file, then you are opening yourself up to civil liability.

Good Point[tm].

While Social media themselves have jumped into that thread and state: "we make it easy for users to opt out of this program. and we also try to ensure that the only people that show up in ads are those that "raise their hand" explicitly and want to share their preferences with their friends (which we enable via the ad layer)" whatever the hell that means. So they reckon that they're covered.

Can we all aree that it's creepy though? And it might even mess up our carefully constructed cool / social standing - if something like this showed up, I would be excluded from the Madonna hater club and stripped of my stripes. I don't see anything on Socialmedia that says this won't happen.

Though, since I will have nothing to do with evil old facebook, who just hired Ted Ullyot, former right-hand man to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as its general counsel [his resumé - the torture memo and other illustrious projects - prediction: waterboarding will be the new "poke"] - it won't happen to me anyway. Hat Tip newmateria.

Related: People's profile images used in ads for Danish Politicians on Facebook