Just when you thought it was safe to place photos on Facebook

After a number of privacy issues over the years, Facebook has repeatedly clarified that it thinks that user privacy is important to them.  Then in December, the possibility of Facebook selling our photos came up, and that seemed to get resolved by the following day:
Dec 18: Facebook to sell your photos: Social media giant claims it owns the rights to ALL your Instagram pictures
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2249952/Facebook-sell-photos-Social-media-giant-claims-owns-rights-ALL-Instagram-pictures.html

Dec 19: Facebook’s Instagram Backtracks: 'It Is Not Our Intention to Sell Your Photos,' Says Co-Founder
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/facebook-instagram-backtracks-not-intention-sell-photos-says-153656165.html

Facebook even created question on a Help page to insist that our concerns over their selling of our data is a myth: 
Common Myths About Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/help/369078253152594/
Does Facebook sell my information?
"No. You have control over how your information is shared. We don't share your personal information with people or services you don't want. We don't give advertisers access to your personal information. We don't sell any of your information to anyone and we never will."

What personal information is shared with sites that use social plugins?
"None of your information—your name, basic info, what you like, who your friends are, what they have liked, what they recommend—is shared with external sites you visit with a plugin. Because they have given Facebook this space on their sites, they don't receive or interact with the information that is contained or transmitted there. Similarly, no personal information about your actions is provided to advertisers on Facebook or on the other site."

So Facebook won't sell our data, including our photos.  Now it turns out that the terms Facebook seems to clearly commit to may not be passed on to creators of Facebook apps.  

Service lets you order prints of any Facebook photo
http://connect.dpreview.com/post/8088565723/photos-at-my-door-app-prints-of-any-facebook-photo

So Facebook may be quite happy to facilitate someone taking and selling your photos, even though you may have thought they insisted that it wouldn't happen. Where in the TOS does it reveal clearly that they're happy to have other commercial entities sell our photos? The reality of Facebook defaulting our photo privacy settings to "share with apps others use" strikes me as clearly contradicting the intentions expressed by Facebook and reinforced in their discussion of their TOS.

I mentioned this on Facebook, and a former 5 year Facebook employee dropped by to say that "it wasn't Facebook who's selling your photos."  Let's say I agreed to watch your home or apartment while you left the country for 3 or 4 weeks.  When you returned, you find that all your belongings had been sold.  I gave my cousin your key, and I backed up the truck so your belongings could be loaded into it.  Would it be an ample defense for me to say "I didn't steal your stuff, and I did watch it… get loaded into the truck"?  Of course not, I facilitated, was a party to, the act of taking it.

There's a simple solution, which Facebook could profit greatly from.  Photos and videos have value, just like music does.  Let photographers opt-in to a service which lets someone use their low res photo on a mug for one dollar, and give that dollar to the photographer.  It's basically like "an +iTunes  for photos".  iTunes licensing individual songs directly to consumers created a new niche for selling music, and it changed the music business while growing it overall.  A similar service for photos and videos might grow the market for images.

Facebook may have challenges implementing such a service at first, but +Google rewards Web site creators with its +Google AdSense/Adwords system, and it operates a market for Android applications to be sold which pays the creators of those apps, so they have existing payment systems which could be adapted to implement a consumer-facing image market.  Google has corporate value of "Do no evil" and a track record of a win-win financial relationships with content creators, while Facebook still seems willing to let our valuable content slip out their back door unnoticed.  

Photographers bring valuable content to these social media parties… who's going to best respect, even reward, the value that we bring?  My money is on Google.  

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Service lets you order prints of any Facebook photo
“Photos At My Door “allows anyone to browse their friends’ albums and create photo products.

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