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Vodafone uses private facebook image and real name in advertisment
Tue, 1st Mar 2011
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Vodafone has apologised after a Facebooker learned that the company had used her image – and name – in a recent promotion without her consent.Auckland woman Kesha Robertson was in South America on a backpacking trip when she was contacted by her father, who sent her a screen grab showing the 24-year-old’s photograph (an image of Inca site Machu Piccu), along with her name on a Vodafone promotion in a New Zealand newspaper.Miss Robertson said she was surprised to learn that her image had been accessed and used by the company, especially considering it was set to ‘private’ on her Facebook account.In a statement reported on the NZ Herald website, a Vodafone spokesperson said that the image had been sourced by a Facebook friend of Miss Robertson’s who worked in Vodafone’s creative team, but that the image and name had been included in the final advertisement in error."It was just a human error mistake... it wasn’t changed as it should have been. Obviously we’re going to investigate and put things in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”Vodafone has now contacted Miss Robertson and offered her an apology as well as a new iPhone.