Facebook has removed Reclaim Yourself, an app that watermarks your photos

Any photos you upload onto a social network technically become their property, meaning the photos can be sold to advertisers, for marketing purposes, and so on. Reclaim Yourself was an app fighting back against that on Facebook, and now it’s gone.

Released last December, Reclaim Yourself was a Facebook app that added watermarks to your photos. The intention was to make them less attractive to advertisers and anyone else who might want to use them. Facebook has now reportedly removed this app.

According to Sipke Jan Bousema and Willem van Leunen, the app’s developers, Facebook allowed them to launch in December but then the app, and all pictures uploaded through it, were removed without warning. They have since filed a formal complaint with Facebook but apparently the social network has yet to respond.

According to The Volksrant, media attention has led to Facebook restoring some of the deleted photos, but not the app itself.

Ubergizmo has pointed out that the removal of Reclaim Yourself has happened in the days leading up to Facebook’s new privacy rules going into effect. Privacy rules that gives Facebook the right to “use all photographs uploaded to the site for other purposes.”