Someone reposted my private photos and Facebook won’t remove them

Q Someone has created a fake Facebook page with my private photos. I didn’t post any of these images on Facebook.

I feel like the person, whoever he or she is, had to have gone to great lengths to find all the pictures. I asked Facebook to delete the page; it refuses.

How is that protecting me? These are my private pictures. I feel like someone is stalking me, or is out to get me. Can you help? — Cherrine Chery, Alpharetta, Georgia

A Facebook shouldn’t be publishing anyone’s private pictures without permission. And that’s particularly true of your images, which were — how do I put this delicately? — for mature audiences only.

How did this happen? At least some of these images started off on your private Facebook page, and you shared with a select group of “friends.” One of those friends wasn’t a real friend and apparently copied the images and created a new page. Next time, think twice before sharing private photos with your friends. If you do, remember there are privacy settings in Facebook that can prevent the wrong people from accessing your personal information (https:// www.facebook.com/ help/325807937506242/).

Let’s have a look at Facebook’s terms: https://www. facebook.com/terms.php.

When you post to the social network, you grant it a “non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any intellectual property content that you post.” Wow, that’s a mouthful, but it basically means that if you upload an image to Facebook, it’s theirs to do with as they please.

In other words, Facebook assumes that whoever uploaded the photos owned the rights to them. If you can make a case that the person did not, Facebook would have to remove them. You can do that in two places. Facebook has a complaint page for image rights (https:// www.facebook.com/ help/400287850027717/) and also for image privacy rights (https:// www.facebook.com/ help/428478523862899).

Even if you can’t remove the images that way, there’s another method. You can invoke Facebook’s community standards. The images in question are in clear violation of Facebook’s standards: https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards.

And if none of that works, I always list Facebook’s executives on my consumer-advocacy site.

Your case had an interesting conclusion. My advocacy team advised you to report this to the police, which you did. Let’s hope they find whoever did it, because this kind of cyberbullying is intolerable. I also reached out to Facebook, even though it has maintained radio silence for the last several cases. This time, however, the company responded and promptly removed the fake page.

If only Facebook had done this the first time you asked.

Christopher Elliott’s latest book is “How To Be The World’s Smartest Traveler” (National Geographic). You can get real-time answers to any consumer question on his forum, elliott.org/forum, or by emailing him at chris@elliott.org.