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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."
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.
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Here's a link to this group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=77069107432
Gotta get me one of these!
pants = British for rubbish
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)
Yeah...In my Economic History class, when talking about the Boston Tea Party it says that "American have learned a new and powerful economic tool...the boycott" Come to think of it now a days, we are so un-disciplined that boycott is not only un-likely....but completely impossible in the majority of minds out there. And if someone is rather strong will or minded, they are still talking to people instead of screens.
To see a few of my Android apps goto: www.hartwired.com
Pants, adj. "Of poor quality". eg "Idle is pants"
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Wow, already past 62,000
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?
maybe not but google does let you download your email via imap, thereby exporting all of your data stored in gmail.
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.
Boycotts aren't supposed to be easy. Neither is any other passive protest. Ghandi didn't go "oh well shit, this is hard, you win".
If you really want Facebook to pay attention, start letter writing campaigns to their advertisers. Start boycotting their advertisers
Better solution: Also harass them, using the phone lines. Jam down their lines.
Facebook, Inc.
156 University Ave or 471 Emerson Street
Palo Alto, CA 94301
Phone: 650-543-4800
Fax: 650-543-4801
Press: 650-543-4811
Unknown: 650-853-1300âZ
http://www.facebook.com/
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.
Am I the only one who read the article?
That makes sense to me.
Proved that they can't be trusted not to stab with one hand while they stroke with another, that is.
I don't understand why they even bothered with that blog posting.
Nothing he said contradicts the new TOS and his post generally boils down to:
"trust us not to enforce the plain language of the TOS."
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
Apparently so, I just logged in and received this message:
A couple of weeks ago, we posted an update to our Terms of Use that we hoped would clarify some parts of it for our users. Over the past couple of days, we have received a lot of questions and comments about these updated terms and what they mean for people and their information. Because of the feedback we received, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.
Pictures are never deleted off disk. Their storage infrastructure doesnt do it as they use a custom filesystem (There was a talk about it published a while ago).
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.
Looks like the blog was taken down. Here it is in full (Google cache still has it stored):
A couple of weeks ago, we updated our terms of use to clarify a few points for our users. A number of people have raised questions about our changes, so I'd like to address those here. I'll also take the opportunity to explain how we think about people's information.
Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they've asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn't help people share that information.
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 created--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. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.
In reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work. Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment.
We still have work to do to communicate more clearly about these issues, and our terms are one example of this. Our philosophy that people own their information and control who they share it with has remained constant. A lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective of the rights we need to provide this service to you. Over time we will continue to clarify our positions and make the terms simpler.
Still, the interesting thing about this change in our terms is that it highlights the importance of these issues and their complexity. People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them--like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on--to other services and grant those services access to those people's information. These two positions are at odds with each other. There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.
We're at an interesting point in the development of the open online world where these issues are being worked out. It's difficult terrain to navigate and we're going to make some missteps, but as the leading service for sharing information we take these issues and our responsibility to help resolve them very seriously. This is a big focus for us this year, and I'll post some more thoughts on openness and these other issues soon.
Actually, leaving Facebook is the equivalent of a boycott on a retail chain. Facebook thrives by collecting and selling market information to advertisers; if people were to stop using Facebook, even for a week, it would hurt that business model.
Palm trees and 8
This wasn't about storing backups (unless the lawyer who wrote it was misinformed about what they needed to have to give backup tapes to an armored car company):
When I kennel your dog, I don't give you a reasonable ToS at the beginning of your vacation, then silently change the ToS two days later to read "you grant irrevocable, perpetual license to sublicense this license, breed your dog, alter your dogs' puppies genetic codes, rent your dog to a movie-studio for a non-PETA approved stunt, clone your dog, etc"
There were things in the new ToS that they never would need for backups. That said, I think what raised the most ire were the all-too-commons clauses of "we can change the ToS any time we want" and "By continuing to use the service, you agree to this ToS" combined with _not_ announcing the new ToS.