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Facebook's New Terms of Service
An anonymous reader writes "Chris Walters writes about Facebook's new terms of service. 'Facebook's terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.
Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.'" Oh no! Now they'll be able to license your super flair goblin poke 25 tag history!
How will they get agreement from current users? Does the TOS pops out the next time they login during the implementation?
Anyone who seriously thought that closing their Facebook account would immediately result in everything they'd released onto the Internet magically being recalled and returned to the realms of privacy is probably accessing their account during their one-hour-a-day computing time in the loony bin.
Who cares if Facebook can technically now use whatever you post forever. So could anyone who archived the page, or even took a screenshot. Not to mention that Facebook really aren't going to have the slightest interest in the average user, nor in using their content if and when they leave the site.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
I'm not really sure why this should come as a surprise to anyone. I mean, do you guys have any idea how valuable that data is to a marketer? For instance, just getting your name and some contact information (through legitimate means, of course) is worth about $20-25 to a typical marketer. That's why companies are so willing to give you special sign-up offers all the time (amazon, buy.com, reward programs, credit cards, banks, etc etc etc). As soon as you start tacking any bit of information onto that basic profile (purchasing habits, interests, etc) that value starts climbing through the roof.
Now, think about what Facebook knows about everyone who's signed up. They have names and contact information. They have leisure-time activities. They have browsing profiles. They have entertainment interests. They have friend lists. And then throw that "25 things people don't know about me" thing that was going around a few weeks ago into the mix. Now they have that information, too. And people are just voluntarily giving all that info away. Of course they're going to hang onto that information (and sell it) if given the chance. What did you think they were going to do with it?
This guy's the limit!
That may be true but it doesn't stop me from posting that picture of you at the party with a lampshade over your head naked as a jaybird screwing that goat does it? Worse, it doesn't stop me from tagging that image "Anonymous Coward screwing around at the party. A must see" and allowing Facebook to index it.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Facebook doesn't have an actual "deletion" procedure for accounts. When someone wants to "delete" their account, it is simply disabled and their profile is no longer accessible, nor does it appear in search results. Their name will still appear in tagged photos and on wall posts, etc, but it will no longer be clickable.
The only way to truly delete one's account is to remove oneself from all tags, delete all posts, remove all pictures and videos, and all other user stuff manually , then "delete" the account. The only way not to leave a trace is to bomb the footsteps.
I think the reason this exists is because Facebook does not handle foreign key deletion well, if at all. The deletion of a user profile record would have to cascade down through every table in the database, removing every instance of that user. Who knows how long that could take. It's easier to simply mark the profile inactive and handle that in software.
This license change allows Facebook to hold on to all of the stuff a user has uploaded even after the user has "deleted" his or her account. IMO, Facebook is using legal means instead of developing a technological solution to the problem.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
There still was this thing called copyright, though. Anything you post is by default copyrighted to yourself. You don't even need to do anything special. So, yes, people could still have your photos in their browser's cache, but weren't legally allowed to do much with them.
E.g., just because I saved your family photo on my hard drive, doesn't mean I can cut and paste your daughter's head into an ad for condoms, nor as an ad for Adult Friend Finder, nor on top of a porn-star's body and sell subscriptions to that site, nor pretty much anything else.
A TOS which grants any entity full rights to your stuff, including to license it further, means pretty much just that: you forfeit any legal rights or recourses you might have had. If they want to use it for any purpose whatsoever, they can. You just gave them that right.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.
I know it is hip to get all hysterical over personal information that is already "out there", but I've highlighted the part that really matters.
In short, they can't do anything with it after you close your account that they couldn't do with it before you closed your account. And since you can change your privacy settings before you close your account this is pretty much a non-issue. Change all your settings to "Only My Friends", then remove all your friends.
Really, people, the only difference here is that they don't do you the service of making all your data inaccessible to the people who could access it before. And why should they? That would be like slashdot removing all your old posts when you remove your account. Yes, I know it's "personal" data, but my guess is your 'friends' are more of a threat to your privacy than Facebook. After all, the only legal consequence for your friends sharing that information is that they can be kicked off Facebook for violating the terms of service.
Like a what?! Dude, seriously, what's wrong with a car analogy?
I hate printers.
You wouldn't steal a car analogy...
shin phantomflanflinger
They would if they had perpetual irrevocable rights to sell the pictures 30 years from now when you run for public office.
A PERSON could go mad trying to pinpoint the moment he lost a friend. So seldom does that friend make his feelings clear by sending out an e-mail alert.
It's not just a fact of life, but also a policy on Facebook. While many trivial actions do prompt Facebook to post an alert to all your friends -- adding a photo, changing your relationship status, using Fandango to buy tickets to "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" -- striking someone off your list simply is not one of them.
It is this policy that Burger King ran afoul of this month with its "Whopper Sacrifice" campaign, which offered a free hamburger to anyone who severed the sacred bonds with 10 of the friends they had accumulated on Facebook. Facebook suspended the program because Burger King was sending notifications to the castoffs letting them know they'd been dropped for a sandwich (or, more accurately, a tenth of a sandwich).
The campaign, which boasted of ending 234,000 friendships, is history now -- Burger King chose to end it rather than tweak it to fit Facebook's policy -- but the same can hardly be said of the emerging anxiety it tapped. As social networking becomes ubiquitous, people with an otherwise steady grip on social etiquette find themselves flummoxed by questions about "unfriending" people: how to do it, when to do it and how to get away with it quietly.
"If someone with more than 1,000 friends unfriends me, I get offended," said Greg Atwan, an author of "The Facebook Book," a satirical guide. "But if someone only has 100 friends, you understand they're trying to limit it to their intimates."
Mr. Atwan, a recent graduate of Harvard (where Facebook got its start), recommends culling your friend list once a year to remove total strangers and other hangers-on. Keeping your numbers down gives you more leeway to be selective about whom you approve in the first place, he said.
(While some people prefer the term "defriending," a quick survey of user-created groups on Facebook shows "unfriending" to be the more popular choice. A Facebook spokeswoman, Brandee Barker, said there was no officially preferred term.)
Of course, not all unfriendings are equal. There seem to be several varieties, ranging from the completely impersonal to the utterly vindictive. First is the simple thinning of the herd, removing that grad student you met at a party two years ago and haven't spoken to since or that kid from middle school you barely remember.
These were the people whom Steven Schiff, a news assistant at Vault.com, a career services Web site, sacrificed to get his Whopper.
"I found there were quite a few people on my list that I'd never even spoken to, much less been close friends with," he said by telephone.
Mr. Schiff, 25, said he experienced only the slightest guilt at eliminating those people. While he didn't feel the need to write to them individually to explain things, he did use his personal blog to address them en masse.
"Let's be honest here, questionable Facebook friend," he wrote. "We've been keeping you around all this time because we'd just feel bad if you ever found out that you got the ax. It's just, well, up until now nobody offered us a Whopper in exchange for your feelings."
This was just the sort of sentiment that Burger King and its advertising agency, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, were aiming to evoke when they set up the campaign. Burger King decided that it would do the talking for this article rather than its agency and delegated the task to Brian Gies, a vice president of marketing who said he was not a member of Facebook and therefore had not participated in the "Whopper Sacrifice."
Mr. Gies explained the marketing team's thinking about Facebook. "It s
Facebook is specifically for private/personal data.
If it's for private and personal data, why is the main function of the site showing it to other people? If you really wanted to keep it private and personal, why has it left your machine?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Seriously ... I'm sick and tired of hearing Facebook this, Facebook that, oh why don't you log on to Facebook, it's great and I'm meeting up with all these people ... sheesh. I've been to high school once already. I didn't like it, and I don't want to do it a second time, ok?
Thankfully, the hype cycle is just about done and everyone will move on to something else soon. Don't believe me? It's just part of a cycle that's been going on for a long time. People moved from AOL, to Yahoo, to MySpace, to Facebook ... it'll continue to happen, right on schedule.
And if that's not enough to convince you, consider the millions of teenagers who get online every year. The *last* thing they want to do is join the same online community that their parents are on! That's SO NOT COOL!!
From a practical point of view, Facebook's "walled garden" approach has failed before. Just ask AOL. A site that requires that you totally immerse yourself in it just to get a feel for what it's about is not sustainable. A while ago I wanted to poke around just to see what all the fuss is about, only to find out that you had to create an account in order to do so. WTF? So I created a throw-away account with a fake name. Then I went to browse the profiles of people I knew were on Facebook, only to find out that you have to "friend" them in order to read their profiles, which would of course subject you to an incoming torrent of high school bullshit from everyone on their friends lists.
No thanks. After seeing the way some people go into withdrawal if they don't check Facebook every 15 minutes, I'm happier than ever to NOT be a part of this particular clusterfuck. I want online tools that SAVE time, not CONSUME more and more of it.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Some pornography company sublicenses photos of one million girls in bikinis and their contact info from Facebook. They then send something like the following letter to the girls:
"Recently, for inclusion in our published material, we purchased the rights to the enclosed photo you licensed to Facebook. We were concerned that you may not want to be included, so we are giving you the chance to opt-out. We need only a payment of $50 to cover the amount we paid Facebook and administrative costs. If you do not want to pay and wished to be included in our published material, you will be featured in our "Skanky Bikini Amateurs" collection on our website. Thank you."
That's a clause that only matters if Facebook is in decline. On the way up, the fate of the information about departed users doesn't matter. On the way down, it matters a lot.
Social networking sites have a life cycle, which is reflected in their long term traffic statistics. They open, they may become popular, the cool people move in, there's a herd effect that makes them grow more if they start to become popular, the losers move in, the cool people leave, growth starts to flatten, and then the long decline starts, usually leveling out at maybe a quarter of peak. This works just like cool nightclubs and restaurants. Anybody who goes out frequently in a major city knows this pattern.
AOL, Geocities, EZboard, Salon, Nerve, Bebo, and Tribe all peaked years ago. Myspace peaked in early 2008, according to Alexa traffic stats. Facebook hasn't visibly peaked yet, but it looks like their management sees the inevitable coming and is getting ready.
This is a hint that it's too late for Facebook to IPO. That had to happen on the way up, or it won't happen at all. There was much talk of a Facebook IPO in 2007 or 2008, but now the word is "2010, if ever". Probably never. They should have gone public earlier.