Facebook Content and Ownership

Question

Hello,

I am working on an app that imports photos from facebook. It creates a few "auto albums" for the users including one called "Photos of Me", which I think is pretty self explanitory (Yes, the "photos you're tagged in" one, provided by facebook).

Anyway, how do I deal with ownership of these photos within my app? do I...

1. Give the user ownership of these photos (of themselves, but "owned" by other facebook users), or...
2. Create dummy accounts for the real owners in case they ever use my application?

Thanks

PS - it is also possible to do both, the app already supports multiple owners of a photo

update: I am aware that facebook provides this functionality already, That is how I'm getting the content to begin with :)

Also, we're only storing IDs, the question is whether it's a good idea to associate the photos (by id) with more than one owner on our site

The site is associating the photos because it allows users to do various actions with them, like aggregation (from lots of networks), creating a single rss feed, linking to a digital picture frame, etc. I just didn't think that was relevant to the question :/

Thanks again!

Answer 1

This functionality already exsits within Facebook, as an album that I believe is called "Tagged Photos." Also, your question makes it sound like it either stores them off-Facebook or off-line on the user's computer. This is another grey area, since any photos the user is in the user didn't take, and likely doesn't have the copyright.

Answer 2

Per the facebook developer wiki, you're not allowed to store facebook user data for more than 24 hours unless you've specifically prompted the user for extended permissions. So you shouldn't be storing the photos themselves. You can store the photo ID's, but you probably wouldn't be asking this question if you were just storing ID's.

You may be able to get around that by specifically asking the user to import the photos into your application, but I don't see how this would be better than prompting for extended permissions, and you would be in a legal gray area.

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Storable_Information