Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Scrambles To Contain ToS Fallout
Ian Lamont writes "Anger over Facebook's ToS update has forced the company to scramble. Yesterday, a spokesman released a statement that said Facebook has never 'claimed ownership of material that users upload,' and is trying to be more open to users about how their data is being handled. Mark Zuckerberg has also weighed in, stating 'we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want.' Facebook members are skeptical, however — protests have sprung up on blogs, message boards, and a new Facebook group called 'People Against the new Terms of Service' that has added more than 10,000 members today."
As long as they promised, there's nothing to worry about, right?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Its enormously popular, and (to some) provides a lot of value... and its free. What did you THINK they were going to do with the info you have up there ? It's a massive social engineering/data mining study, and you're taking part in it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
All, of course, agreed to the new Terms of Service. So they can't be too against them.
Facebook Privacy Change Sparks Federal Complaint
For those who don't like long reads: Promises aren't enough. EPIC wants it reversed, and is filling a Federal Trade Commission complaint.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Excuse me but why is this tagged with "pants"?
Pffft! How 'bout people for using an alternative to facebook? I doubt they have a monopoly on this business.
What?
This is why I refuse to sign-up to Facebook, not to mention all those apps, and Facebook themselves, selling your personal details.
Then there's the servers in the US where the department of Homeland Security could go through my personal details on a whim.
Maybe this will make people work out the problems with Facebook. Probably not.
and a new Facebook group called 'People Against the new Terms of Service' that has added more than 10,000 members today."
God that is the laziest form of protest ever. Yeah let's join a group on the service we are protesting to show how much we disagree with this new policy! If you take such exception, stop using the damned service.
Companies don't really care about blogs, message boards, and protest facebook groups. They only care about the number of subscribers they have.
The question is: Will *you* use the most effective form of protest or will you continue to use the company's products and whine about it?
Dont we have this discussion about once a year?
I remember the exact same thing going down with Flikr, Myspace, Youtube... Of course I dont agree with the wording and implications of the new TOS but can anyone point me to an example where any of these sites have commandeered content and used it nefariously? Microsoft maybe once?
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
This isn't anything new. I used to use facebook somewhat and posted a few things to it until I caught wind of their TOS. They essential claimed at least partial ownership of anything posted to their site at the time and I didn't feel as though it was a fair shake. I essentially stopped using it at that point.
My account is still active and every few months I check it and add anyone that I'd care to have contact information for. Essentially it's a glorified rolodex for me, with the added bonus that other people can find me. Personally, if I wanted to talk with someone I'd rather call them up and have a cup of coffee or a meal instead of sending little messages back and forth. Technology is a fairly big part of my life. I work with it, play with it, and use it for research. I don't really feel it should be a big part of my social life, however.
Maybe I'm just a luddite in that regard, but I prefer face to face meetings over anything else that we've developed over the last hundred years.
Here's a link to this group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=77069107432
Gotta get me one of these!
Seems like a nice ploy, what with all them angry, uppity nettards jumping to action in a flurry of group joins, posting and pageloads!
Guess they've been taking notes from livejournal.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I only use myspace, gmail + other google services, LinkedIn, and twitter. They certainly don't fit your description, so I'm good.
...i've already committed digital seppuku. I'm done with these companies. How do you start as a cool project by some college CS dudes and end up as such douche bags?
THL phish sticks
and a new Facebook group called 'People Against the new Terms of Service' that has added more than 10,000 members today."
There are enough "People Against [X]" (the New Layout; Christianity; Atheism; BlueBell Ice Cream; Rational Thought; etc etc) groups on Facebook to occupy someone for a lifetime. And every time one pops up and I am peppered with invitations from my friends to it or one of its dozens of identical groups with different spelling/grammatical errors in the name, I always have to laugh, because I'm pretty sure the people at Facebook react to the groups the same way I do.
What's the point? Do these groups really accomplish anything?
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
You can never actually delete it; just deactivate it. That basically means all your info is still stored on their servers.
I try to use carrier pigeons, smoke signals, semaphore flag towers, and the telegraph whenever possible.
I bet few here know that the famous RFC 1149 has actually been implemented.
I'm working on a writeup for a semaphore based system. Still not sure how to handle bad routes due to German invasions.
This must be so the CIA can legally keep the info it gathers on everyone through facebook.
You're only as smart as your brain.
I yanked my photos off and I won't be putting up any more. Facebook is a reasonable place to stay in touch with friends as long as you have your privacy settings locked down, but other than that... forget it. Their backpedaling is just ridiculous. Want to make a statement? Then change the policy. Or give at least an opt-out for "No, I do not wish to grant Facebook any rights to my copyrighted materials". They can say "well, that's not really what we mean" all they want. The policy is pretty clear... post a photo or video on Facebook and they claim they can do whatever they want with it now and forever.
This is a pretty reasonable review of the various policies of social media sites. http://amandafrench.net/2009/02/16/facebook-terms-of-service-compared/
I'll continue to post my images to flickr (lower resolution of course)... but certainly not to Facebook any longer.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
It is just a website. If it is something that you wouldn't share with the public on that type of site, you probably should not be using it for your "real" private conversations or things that happen to you that you would not want anyone to know. Like someone said, you can do that in person over coffee or a meal or in the privacy of your own home. When you have friends in California or another state, it is a convenient communication source.
It is just a friend site for most people. I don't see what the big deal is really about Facebook having information on my status update about how I am doing my dishes or errands, going to a play or out with friends. I certainly would not post anything on that site that an employer would look up and think was inappropriate. I doubt anyone would talk about anything remotely private on Facebook or MySpace, I think those are best left to talking about in person or over the phone or through email. Most people have lives really.
God forbid anybody write their ToS in regular, everyday, guy-on-the-street English (or the local language of choice). If it weren't for all the legalese written by lawyers, for lawyers, that only a third lawyer could understand, this sort of crap wouldn't happen. Instead, you end up with pages and pages of babble that most people don't understand, and therefore won't bother to read. IANAL, but couldn't that be grounds to have the whole thing thrown out on the notion of "How can I competently agree to something if I don't have a law degree to understand the blasted thing?"
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
You posted a comment on slashdot, with your homepage set to techiehelplist.com, which a whois shows is registered to a Jamie B*****n with complete address in a state south of Idaho. It took less time to find that out than it took to type this comment. (If it's _not_ you, it's a pretty good start).
I don't know how to commit digital seppuku myself, but I think you're doing it wrong ;-P
(all in fun)
Stand by for Google's new product: Goobook. Would you believe it's called Bookle? No? Well, ok, maybe not - but this *is* a real business opportunity for somebody that has more than a theoretical familiarity with ethical business practices to make Facebook's future a little less certain (no, not you, MSN - I said *ETHICAL* business practices).
would give up their passwords for a chocolate bar? Most people have no flipping clue about privacy and hence they post images of themselves with sawed-off shotguns and are surprised when they are subsequently arrested on federal weapons charges.
Most people don't have a clue about privacy; they have even less of a clue about online privacy.
Just seeing what the anti-Prop-8 people have done out here in California (creating a mash-up with Google maps and the Prop-8 donor database) is enough to create pause in the type of information that one makes public. The question isn't whether anything you've written in your facebook profile could now be construed negatively, it's whether it could ever be construed in a non-helpful light. Either you're really boring or you lack imagination.
In general, though, anyone who thinks that Facebook owes them privacy is sadly mistaken and about to get mugged by life many times over in the decades coming.
After 9 years running a Quake III: Arena game server i have to see now that they changed the master server to rank game servers randomly.
People don't care that facebook has their information when they sign-up and are using it, but if they were to theoretically remove their account, and their personal info wasn't removed OMG HAXZ!
If Facebook hasn't mis-used your information while you are using it, why would they mis-use it when you aren't?!
If it were in some way suspicious that they didn't automatically delete information, maybe there would be reason for concern. I just don't see that there is. A large portion of the information a person shares with Facebook is linked with other peoples personal information, so removing all of it could be problematic.
There is also precedence for this. WoW no longer deletes personal content. Many many websites with registration features don't even HAVE an un-register feature.
This is such an unusual situation where a companies TOS is causing such an uproar. I think it is a strong sign of the times and the evolution of the internet user. Were people to start reading (and being outraged at) software TOS, I wonder if the response would be the same. Further I can only hope that the power of the user causes a change to the Facebook TOS(though, I doubt it will).
Attempting to deactivate your Facebook gives you a very interesting message:
Sadly, if you check the ToS, nothing has really changed. Just seems they are afraid people will be leaving en masse due to this.
Maybe protesting facebook by using facebook can be applied to other things.
PETA can start protesting by joining a slaughterhouse.
so like you read the bit where even if you deactivate your account, they still say they own shit you posted, right?
"This morning, I reported on Facebook's new terms of service, which appears to assert permanent rights to any content that users create or upload, even after they delete it from the site. "
Wow, already past 62,000
Wrong. http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account
Your account will be deleted within a few days and they'll follow up with an email asking if you don't mind sharing why you've decided to delete it.
I've done it (last year sometime); I recommend you do, too.
I think Gmail is the same; do they provide a way to export your email so that you can upload it to some other provider? Yeah, I didn't think so.
You mean like by using IMAP or POP?
I'm thinking this is the biggest reason for the ToS change. Rick Sanchez is on CNN every weekday between 3-4PM. Those of you that have seen his show knows that he takes questions from people on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. I posted a question on Rick Sanchez's facebook page and was watching the show and *BAM* there is my full name, picture, and question live and full screen on CNN. The question was answered by the 3rd most powerful congressman in America. I never received any notice that they were going to post it and I've been trying for days to get a copy of the episode for my own collection. Rick won't reply to my messages and I haven't been able to get a copy going the suggested route by CNN through a company that handles purchasing episodes for them. They won't reply either... Go figure.
maybe not but google does let you download your email via imap, thereby exporting all of your data stored in gmail.
I deleted my Facebook account over this. I gave 24 hour notice to the people on my friends list and that was it.
as someone pointed out on another forum, facebook has a huge problem with cascading deletes. if you delete your account and facebook were to delete all records in all the tables of you, they would take a major performance hit. the only way to delete yourself is to remove all comments, wall posts, and pictures then erase your account
What are people going to do, stop using Facebook? You and I informed users, maybe, but if Facebook only catered to people without the critical thinking skills to even care about a TOS let alone what it says, they'd lose, what, maybe 5% of their userbase? Fact is that this "fallout" doesn't even come CLOSE to the radar of the typical Facebook user. This is essentially a non-controversy.
to these damn companies anyway? Facebook, Myspace, Livejournal and all the rest of them. The whole thing gives me the willies. Much better to get plain old web hosting and pay for it and control it yourself. Anyone remember Facebook's "Beacon" program? It's one insidious scheme after another. After this TOS stuff, it will be something else.
Find something without the BS. There are alternatives.
The whole facebook/myspace stuff is funny because they make money off you. They should pay you.
Sourceforge TOS has had this same bullshit for years. They claim a full license to do whatever they want with whatever you upload, including sub-license. In fact, you can't even upload third party files, or derivative works such as GPL forks without violating the TOS. It is why I moved my FOSS project to CVSdude.
I'm reminded of a comment from a previous story, about how it takes strong leadership to manage company lawyers, who will otherwise go on a paranoid spree about their particular fears.
These companies employ lawyers to produce contracts that excuse them any liability and grant them infinite rights "just in case", and then get very surprised when users actually take them seriously. "But we wouldn't really do that!"
Clue: tell your lawyers what you ACTUALLY need and want, don't just let them fill in the gaps with their imaginations.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Who cares what happens to Facebook. If your life revolves around Facebook, promptly remove your head from your ass.
I think you're confusing GMail with Hotmail or perhaps Yahoo. GMail has free IMAP or POP, Hotmail has their own particular brand of lock in and Yahoo forces you to pay for the privilege of POP access to your own data.
I always wondered where this setting was...
It now has the old behavior, though it retains the acknowledgement that archived copies may still exist on Facebook's servers (which is more than reasonable, just so they don't claim a license to use those archived copies for anything they please.)
End of story for now.
Though sooner or later they're going to abuse their monopoly in a substantial way. Oh well.
All your face are belong to us!
Don't you have someone you'd die for?
I joined this group this morning (PST) and it had 10K members, the evening, it is about to pass 65K. Hmm, a social networking site, well, doing what a social networking site does best. Man did this story ever explode. NY Times, NPR, WSJ, all have picked up on this. What a PR Hindenberg.
I guess it's that time of the year again, eh?
ATTENTION SHOPPERS: PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE NECROTIC DOG PENIS. I REPEAT, PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE NECROTIC DOG PENIS CURRENTLY LOOMING OUTSIDE LOT 4. CONTINUE SHOPPING BUT PLEASE ENSURE YOU LEAVE VIA AN ALTERNATIVE EXIT AS WE ARE NO LONGER ABLE TO GUARANTEE YOUR SAFETY IN LOT 4, DUE TO THE NECROTIC DOG PENIS. FOR YOUR INFORMATION, LOTS 1, 2, 3, 5 AND 6 ARE CURRENTLY FREE OF BAYING NECROTIC DOG PENIS. PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE NECROTIC DOG PENIS. THANK YOU.
Wow, I'd hate to meet the owner of that necrotic dog penis! And the owner of aforementioned dog is probably a British woman.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Actually, Hotmail (re)enabled POP3 recently.
Is it just me, or does this beg important questions? Questions such as "What good is being the holder of a copyright if someone else has an irrevocable, exclusive license to do whatever they wish, including your mother, with the copyrighted material?" I was always under the impression the point of this copyright thingy that the big media is all uppity about was for the owner to control that information!
Wouldn't the exclusive license prevent one from further licensing the material that they themselves actually own? This almost seems unenforceable.
Of course, Mark Zuckerberg is going to sugarcoat it any way he can in order to make sure the drones stay calm and controlled. After all, Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't tell a lie. Especially not about copyrights and ownership.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Or perhaps they might pick a random name out of a hat and come up with something along the lines of "Orkut".
Orkut works well if you're in India or Brazil. If you're in North America or Europe/UK, orkut is as useful as friendster.
They do pay you, in kind with a service.
i notice, against all effort with the Live branding, that MS cant shake the hotmail branding at all.
Balderdash!
What happens to photos and videos that I already granted someone else an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers)?
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Am I the only one who read the article?
That makes sense to me.
non-exclusive
Think you just answered yourself there, buddy.
Also, fuck John Birch.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
It appears, on the surface, that the old ToS is back in effect; the ToS page is dated September 23, 2008.
It does bring to mind a new question. If you delete content and thus revoke Facebook's omnipotent rights to your now-deleted content, how does Facebook ensure that the content is no longer used by those sub-licensors? I can appreciate the need to spell out that Facebook is going to make copies of posted content as part of serving up Web pages, spreading server load, backups, etc., but how about not going any farther than that?
Maybe if Facebook drops the terms that they claim the right to use posted content for other commercial purposes (in particular sub-licensing) I may consider giving it another try; but otherwise, forget it. The bright spot in all this is that it has (finally) awakened me to really read the ToS when setting up accounts on websites like this.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
shit, either. A year or two ago, they were on the mat for following browsing habits even after the user is logged off. Sure, there was a "big backlash", but as you can see, the Facebook management didn't learn a thing.
Oh, reading the comments, it doesn't seem that people remember that event, at all. I guess Facebook are right to try, again and again. Rape their users for all they're worth.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
So in response to a TOS they don't like, they go and use said service MORE, thus generating more income for the company that rammed the new TOS down their throat?
That's, like... dumb, right?
With the new TOS, they can keep everyone's 25 Things lists that have become the quite the rage, data mine those lists and sell the results to interested parties. How about insurance companies looking for people with prior medical histories or questionable behavior patterns? People are posting quite a lot of personal information on those Facebook lists of 25 things...
I have POP3 access to my Yahoo mail for free. Now, I signed up for it about 7 or 8 years ago so maybe it's a privilege for "old" accounts... but they definitely don't force me to pay anything at all.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Does not like the Internet in its current form. They don't want consumers to make rational decisions or be informed by their piers of Big Business wrong doings.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Recent events have led me to believe that the ToS was changed because Facebook is beginning to delve into TV promotion. I think it was during the NBA All-Star Game that I saw a Facebook plug in one of the overlays that came up. If they are going to be putting up any user-generated content in their ads (which to me seems wholly unnecessary), they'll need to cover their backs by claiming free use of all submitted content as a term of service.
Of course very few if any people like the idea that they can't opt out of being data mined and sub-licensed once they've signed up, and thus the backlash.
10000 / 175x10^6 = 1/2 of 1% of 1%
Even if they added that many users every day for a full year, it wouldn't be a particularly significant portion of Facebook users (based on usage info from Wikipedia).
Largely, the change was made so that if they made, say, a Facebook TV commerical and they flashed your picture on the screen, they didn't have to pull the TV ad if you deleted your account. Or if they made a commerical where you see thousands of statuses in the background, or a Quiz a user made is referenced. Is it a good reason, I basically think so - it's not so they can claim your data after you close the account, but a CYA so users can't grief them when they do their next marketing push. The company doesn't WANT your data.
Who ever reads the Terms of Service. As long as your peers are using it, you will too.
In this field no matter how much you know, You still don't know anything.
Useless comma called, he wants them all back!
If I can not smoke in heaven, then I shall not go. -- Mark Twain
If I put GPL code on their website, that can execute, but cannot grab the source code. They would be in breach of the GPL.
Now, can anyone make this happen?
Did that come before or after google introduced the ability to get your hotmail stuff (plus yahoo and a bunch of others) into gmail, and then, via imap/pop, into a desktop mail client?
God: An invisible friend for grown-ups.
Well, Orkut was the name of the guy who created Orkut in his spare time, so it wasn't really random. More like deliberately weird.
Just logged into my account (blah blah yes yes, so sue me) and at the very top of the page is a message -
Terms of Use Update
Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.
If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.
---
They're paying attention, anyway.
I've had a yahoo mail account since the mid 90s and pop3 has never been a free feature as far as I can remember. I did at one point pay for their premium services so that I could do a pop3 dump/archive before setting an auto-responder letting people know that I don't actively check the address any longer. Which brings up another problem cause by not providing free account redirection or pop3/imap, it encourages autoresponders which effectively amplify the congestion caused by spam...
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
Terms of Use Update
Close
Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.
If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.
I think I've been reading that as "exclusive" for quite awhile...silly me.
What happens if I decide to trademark something? Can I use that as grounds to sue over trademark dilution?
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Yahoo works for me. pop.mail.yahoo.fr on port 995 - SSL. It's free, but the Yahoo site seems to suggest it's a premium service. Maybe it's just because I've had my account for so long...
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
This all reminds me of a bunch of drunk people in a bar arguing with the manager. Facebook is a COMMERCIAL SITE. People so put their lives on facebook deserve everything they get.
Whats the harm in yelling 'Computer, end program!'? You could be living in Star Trek! Go on.. give it a try.
One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are createdâ"one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work.
Except that Facebook is completely unlike email, because everything in under the control of a single company, in a single application. If I share something with a friend (and by "share" that means "make a status update" or "post a new public photo", not necessarily privately a one-to-one private exchange), Facebook does not make a separate copy of that information in their database for every single person that might read it, that is under that person's exclusive control. The data and sharing terms remain under Facebook's control at all times.
So in the UK they should be terrified of the first person to issue a Data Protection Act request to stop processing personal information which, if a request were justified (e.g. "someone is stalking me, I need to be anonymous for a while"), could force Facebook to delete every piece of information linked to your account. For instance they would have to turn your name and every reference to your account into Account_Redacted1234, leaving status updates and historical information deleted or looking broken. They would probably also have to remove / blur any tagged photos to comply fully.
If there is ever a channel for this kind of information editing to start happening, Facebook could be in trouble as soon as somebody starts a "this site sucks, and I'm going to get my information deleted!" movement. As a defence they are trying to retroactively write themselves blank cheques with people's personal data in ways that seem rushed and legally questionable in some parts of the world.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
Too late. He was killed in 1945 by sympathizers of the Chinese Communist Party. He was a missionary who helped Jimmy Doolittle get to safety after bombing Tokyo.
I think you were talking about the society that was named for him thirteen years later. Google is your friend.
well... you said it yourself... "non-exclusive". It doesn't matter then.
If you upload something to a third party:
- They automatically give themselves license to do whatever they want with it because
a) They aren't going to contact you to ask if it's okay
b) They protecting their ass from being sued by you if you change your mind, or willfully upload material in which to cause liability
c) They can send your contact information to rights owners under the DMCA, if a rights owner has laid claim to something you uploaded... this includes claims from other facebook members.
- You should never upload contect to a "free" site that
a) You don't own
b) You don't have the rights to, and never will
c) You want to make money with
Since the site is "free", they are under no obligation to give you any support whatsoever, and you can't sue them for putting ads and making money off of content you put there. People like to steal, don't put photos up that you don't want to see photo-shopped onto dogs butts.
If the site was a pay site, then you can at least make the two justifications
- Violation of your terms of use, DMCA takedown against the user of your content.
- Threaten your host with going elsewhere if they make money from you paying for their service.
It's hard to compete with "free"
The problem is that people already use Facebook and they are invested in it (they have friends, pictures, etc)...
Woah, hold up, lets just stop right here for a second. "invested in it"? No, NO one has "invested" jack shit into Facebook except their voluntary time(unless you're one of those poor souls who bought a few Facebook "friends" off eBay or some other weirdness). Come talk to me after you've spent money on domain names, server hardware, hosting, and bandwidth and we'll revisit the definition of "invested".
...and this is a change in TOS that you can't refuse, if you just leave Facebook the TOS says (from what I understand) that they have control over your info... so what use to leave now?
Ah, Wow. And this is different from Google how? Damn near every damn thing we enter as input online is tracked by Google (including this post, ironically enough), yet we seemed to have laid down our arms because we(hold on to your seat for this one) use/abuse Google as a service as well. Sounds amazingly like yet another half a dozen companies that offer free services.
Moral of the story? You get what you pay for.
And I warned 'em I did, warned 'em that this sort of thing would happen.
Which is why I run an email server myself and host my own website. My data, my rules. People these days seem to be too keen to throw away absolutely any right or claim of ownership or privacy and give their data away to anyone that asks just because he has a nice web-front end and yet another way to spam their friends with pointless crap.
Why not just upload a ton of pictures of polar bears in a snowstorm? (I think the limit is something like 4-10MB for pictures and 10MB for video.) Not that I'm advocating anything malicious. I just happen to like polar bears and snow.
Just the information I was looking for.
There are 1 863 other people from the continental USA of Caucasian decent whom also list the combination of lesbian porn, stab-a-knife-blade-between-fingers game and have played ultimate frisbee.
There is a 67% chance you have a mortgage, probably with provider X given the regression including active usage of Internet comment system participation which will lead to a probability of 0.9756 that you have greater than $14 000 cash in a bank account.
Given this combination, you are susceptible to pleas of help from Y charity for amounts requesting not greater than $135.00
Pay-dirt.
.
Orkut is a really unfortunate name in Dutch.
What with all the fallout, the Facebook team has decided to revert to the old ToS until they can finish re-writing what they think will be less offensive new terms. Here's the blog post: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54746167130
Only in the USA. Register at yahoo.com.au gives you free POP access.
People are territorial. That's why they have doors with locks, and garden fences, railings, barbed wire and... borders.
It has been suggested that Communism in the Soviet Union failed because it failed to take into account human nature. If people don't directly benefit from their efforts then they are less likely to make an effort.
The same is true of open borders. Sure it creates a more competitive market place, but it also ensures that communities are disrupted and people are less likely to form bonds with their neighbours if there is too much churn in the population.
Slave labour is a pretty good form of labour. High returns for low outlay, but just because it is the cheapest form of labour, doesn't mean we should use it.
Likewise with open borders: helps competition but that isn't the only factor to take into account.
I have a collection of photographs. Not to go into too much detail, but they are good pics and are of me and a group of people from a few years back. I gave each member of that group a copy of those pics. One of them has now posted the best of those pics on his facebook account...
What happens next ?? If facebook decide to use them, do I have to "sue" facebook who will then countersue my friend has he didn't have license to publish them in the first place ?
"I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called 'brightness' but it doesn't work."
Thank you for that. It restored my faith in humankind.
Note: no comma was (ab)used in this post.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Well, that wouldn't help at all, since the protest is mainly about the fact that they changed the TOS to give them the freedom to use your own personal data as they see fit EVEN if you delete your account.
I suspect this is merely a boilerplate change to cover the legal status of ownership/possession of the users' content on the backup media when accounts are deleted. The new terms were quite poor, because they were too broad and vague in what they permitted the company to do, the users interpreted this is the worst possible light, and we have the situation you now see. (It is important to note that the users were not incorrect to interpret the terms in the worst possible light! One should always look at worst-case interpretations of a legal contract.)
The old terms were likely insufficient, and placed the company at risk of a lawsuit for retaining data (on any media, in any form) that the user had deleted. In reality, it is not feasible to search out all copies of a user's content on all live and backup media to over-write it if they delete their account.
By taking ownership in perpetuity, the company mitigates any legal risk from maintaining backups, and the old backup data could be destroyed over time through the process of backup media destruction or re-use in another backup process.
Now the lawyers will have to revisit the boilerplate language, remove it, and craft a new legal framework to cover this situation with much more in the way of specifics (maximum length of data retention, method of data destruction, possibilities for restoration before the maximum time elapses, liability of the company toward the user if the obligation for deletion is not met by the maximum stated time, etc...etc...)
This is how terms-of-service documents get so long and unwieldy, folks.
my account got deleted by face book last month. (because I would not give them my real last name)
The information is only useful as long as a reasonable amount is valid. A much better protest is to start changing info, uploading random pictures, videos, etc. the data they mine is less valid and they have to host more crap. I suck at coding, but wouldn't it be possible to have a program that did this with one click. It could also be a slow conversion to not alert admins.
Everybody seems to think I'm lazy I don't mind, I think they're crazy
While I worry tremendously about Big Brother Gov't, I'm most anxious about YOU and YOU and YOU, my brothers and sisters with whom I, knowingly or not, deal everyday.
Welcome to "civilization", isn't it grand?
Well, I wrote this from an undisclosed location under a pseudonym so I *KNOW* my info is totally secret and controlled only by me.
This post reminds me of: "All your base are belong to us!"
or auto-forwarding
Gmail has had POP since the very beginning, or at least as long as I can remember.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
" protests have sprung up on blogs, message boards, and a new Facebook group called 'People Against the new Terms of Service'"
Ya that'll show them. All Facebook has to do is wait a couple weeks until the backlash dies down. By that time all of these protesters will have resumed their normal Facebook addiction.
Out of all these protesters, how many will actually voice their dissatisfaction by actually canceling or ceasing their use of Facebook? 1%? Maybe 2%?
Yes, and they're now rolling out a feature whereby mail with yahoo, hotmail & other providers can be imported into your gmail account.
God: An invisible friend for grown-ups.
If they want to retain all rights to users' User Content, give them just that. Just make sure you upload as many videos as possible to make their servers smoke...
Why is it so hard for these companies like Google and Facebook, to maintain a non-sleezy TOS? It seems like they start out good- user-oriented when they're small, but as they grow they just start to say screw the user, we need to make money.
I like Plaxo.com's terms of service and privacy policy. They don't seem to have trouble outlining a policy for this situation:
"Changes to Your Information are typically executed immediately. For example, if you terminate your Plaxo account, your account immediately becomes inaccessible and all Your Information within your account is completely removed from the Plaxo servers. Please remember that if you have shared Your Information with other Members, they may retain such shared information in their accounts notwithstanding your decision to terminate your Plaxo account."
Considering that Google etc. have huge caches and that people have been downloading and using images of all sorts -- it's a wonder anyone thinks that anything that got posted on any website anywhere won't live longer than they will.
(at least when I last tried) you can't even view someone's facebook page without signing up to facebook.
Stupid private-internet.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Actually, Yahoo POP is free of charge in some other countries. If I understand correctly, for some reason it was illegal not to have the option in the UK. I've got it working fine in Mail on a MacBook.
You can always set up a UK account and have it display a US (if that's your base) homepage.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/uk/yahoo/mail/original/manage/manage-281222.html
Like fruey, I have always had pop3 access via my free Yahoo account, and I have never paid for it. I don't know (now) how to set it up for a new Yahoo account. It seems they've changed some things. RFT!!! Dave Kelsen -- "Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching." -- Satchel Paige
'We wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want.'
These are weasel words. By using the words "would not" he leaves himself a loophole, since these words imply there is a conditional aspect to his statement.
If he really wanted to make a concrete statement then he would have said, "We will not share your information with anyone without your permission."
"and a new Facebook group called 'People Against the new Terms of Service'..."
Which, to my eyes, is merely a new way of saying that Facebook is PANTS.
And I'm not even British.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I'm glad that I resisted peer pressure and refused to join 'fascistbook' from the beginning. Employers can look you up, so can law enforcement - it's like having an open source life, no thx
Mark Zuckerberg is a lier on all accounts.
Facebook is bleeding $$$$ and he and the other twerps need to social engineer the minions.
The wall has been whacked ... and Facebook is a snowball.
Ha. Pay me $300.00 per hour, and I'll correct your grammar and punctuation, as well. Proofreading services aren't free, and you are apparently in desperate need.
I'm typically not a grammar nazi, but when you corrected the easily overlooked mistake without noticing the glaring omission, I couldn't resist. Please don't take it personally that I found it amusing.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
There's more to tea' than meets the eye...
In one of our latest elections, where some contestant where obviously spreading lies, I had an idea : since good faith no longer mean anything (ie. shame & destroyed trust's extinction as moral values), why not put a $large amount on its truthfulness, through LEGALLY BINDING CONTRACT ?
To put it in another light, a promise only binds those who believe in it !!!
Yahoo forces you to pay for the privilege of POP access to your own data.
I am nitpicking but they still offer POP in their non-.com domains. But yeah, I didn't like it that they removed that :(