Comment by tsimionescu

They are an Instagram post that is shown to make you buy something, not because anyone you follow posted it. So, it's an ad. The fact that they're using your face in a Meta ad doesn't make it any different from any other ad.

You're probably thinking about this as not a problem from a privacy perspective, and you may be right that this is not technically a privacy issue. But it's still a huge problem from a psychological influence perspective. Ads are already extremely good at manipulating your psyche, adding the ability to show you personally in some wonderful situations that their product would apparently put you in is a whole other level in manipulation.

Plus, if this gets normalized, the next step is absolutely going to be to sell this as a new type of ad to other brands (assuming people end up interacting with such ads more).

Edit to say: thinking about it, I actually think it's a privacy violation even for a Meta ad. Giving them permission to use an image of my face to generate a better selfie doesn't give them permission to use it to serve me ads. The GDPR is pretty specific about this: when you opt into sharing personal data for a specific purpose, that has to be interpreted in a narrow sense, you can't arbitrarily broaden the scope.