The image of 17-year old Canadian Rehteah Parsons, a teen who committed suicide after being bullied, was being used in an ad on Facebook for a dating site, CTV News reports, and though it is an upsetting circumstance, a social media expert says it's one of the realities of today's online world.

Parsons's photo appeared in a "Sponsored Ad" on Facebook for dating site lonechat.com, the ad proclaiming, "Find Love in Canada! Meet Canadian girls and women for friendship, dating or relationships. Sign up now!" A screenshot of the offending ad was posted to Twitter, and Facebook was quick to respond, saying the ad was a "gross violation" of the company's policies and removing it from the website.

However, Prof. Robert Currie of Dalhousie University in Halifax told CTV News that more and more companies are now using automated software that rips photos from websites.

"This is how technology works and it's another example of how little control anyone has over any image once it gets out into the Internet sphere," Currie said. "It really seems to me to be an unfortunate accident that is causing a lot of grief and heartbreak to the Parsons family and others who loved this girl and who were disturbed by this case. But it's just the kind of thing that is going to happen."

Anh Dung, the administrator of lonechat.com, told CTV news that the use of Parson's picture was in fact a mistake, the result of a program that randomly takes images from Google known as an image-scraper.

"I'm a foreigner, so I didn't even know her name and the story...so I didn't know it was the victim's photo," Dung wrote in an email, adding that he has removed the image from the site. "I feel so guilty, I sincerely apologize. I'm so stressed right now."

"It clearly would be unethical to automatically scrape pictures where you don't have permission and use it for commercial purposes," said Anatoliy Gruzd, a social media expert at Dalhousie. "But unfortunately, for those companies or organizations that are scraping those images automatically, it's hard to train the algorithm to recognize what pictures are OK to scrape and what pictures are not."

In April, Parsons hung herself after enduring months of bullying brought on by an alleged sexual assault and photo from the incident that had been circulating her school. After her death, her parents created a Facebook memorial page for their daughter, "Angel Rehteah," which they used to post a screenshot of the offending lonechat.com ad.

"It's our image. It belongs to Rehtaeh's family. Just to lift it off and start using it like that is very thoughtless," Rehtaeh's father, Glen Canning, told CTV News. Facebook has since banned lonechat.com from its site.

"I think banning the Ionechat.com company was the right move to make," said Canning. "It's hard to say what can be done, but I think Facebook removed it fast, and I appreciate that, and they apologized for it, which is good." 

via the International Business Times