What would you do if you suddenly found a picture of yourself being used to promote dramatic weight loss… and you hadn’t given consent?
That’s the position singer/song writer/vlogger Meghan Tonjes found herself in recently when she woke up one morning and received a Facebook message from one of her YouTube subscribers asking her about an advertisement Tonjes had ‘appeared in’.
The subscriber had attached the image of the advertisement which featured a photograph of Meghan and included an entire story about the miraculous weight loss she had undergone with the help of a specific weight loss clinic in Georgia, US.
But the thing was… Tonjes had never heard of this clinic, let alone agreed to feature in their ads.
Not long after this information had come to her attention she made a vlog and uploaded it to her YouTube Channel informing her viewers of just how angry she was.
“I am shaking right now, I’m so furious,” Tonjes said in her opening line.
Watch her YouTube video condemning the advertising here. Post continues after video.
When Tonjes called the clinic she was told she could only leave a message for the doctor behind the advertisements:
This was the message she left him.
“Can you tell him that photo I was talking about… in that photo I was actually around 276 pounds and my name is not DA my name is Meghan Tonjes, I haven’t breast feed a child and used this program, I didn’t lose weight in that way. I was actually sent a picture on Facebook that shows that the doctor seems to be using advertising of my face on his success stories wall and I don’t know who this man is or why my picture is being used to promote something that I haven’t used but I just wanted to let the doctor know that I hope he had a good day off and I’ll be contacting my lawyer because that’s incredibly illegal to use my face for advertising without payment and without notification.”