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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."
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.
When you are not a criminal, you don't need criminal tools. We don't let the super of a building keep bump keys, even if it is convenient for him. Instead he has to request and receive a copy of each resident's key if they allow it.
The online community has to learn that NO, you can't just do what you want. If you want a contract to be valid, then the other guy has to agree to it. The worse your contract, the fewer people will agree. If you worsen the TOS, then some of your people will leave you.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Simple. You hire a bunch of lawyers that you expect are going to look out for you, but in the process they write some new language that pisses off all of your customers. Same thing happened with Fark a while back, hopefully Zuckerberg will take a clue from Drew and realize the people really DO have a point.
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
There's a problem: there is no serious competitor (yet) and network effects make switching to a different social network difficult. The real fix is to use some sort of open / distributed social networking system (so it is more like e-mail/Jabber), but I do not know of any real solution in that area. A large part of the problem is that Facebook handles networks (groups based on school/company/location) as part of its privacy controls and it is hard to replicate that.
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?
Exactly true - at the beginning of 2008 I got fed up with the site and deleted my account.
Peer pressure and boredom brought be back 3 months later and I remade an account with the same information - to my suprise my ENTIRE account was restored, I mean EVERYTHING. Every picture, every comment, every message, every tagged photo... everything you do on Facebook is stored away for good.
More than just backups. When you "delete" something your just setting a Is_Deleted flag on their database. As far as facebook is concerned, your information is just as easily available as if you were an active member.
What if you simply change it, say, to something bogus?
They might have some kind of version control system, but a version control system is really a kind of backup with a particular purpose.
Yep, I am fully aware that you can find my information. I'm from Utah, I rather like lesbian porn, I am pretty good at that stab-a-knife-blade-between-fingers game, and I once got my nose broken playing a game of ultimate frisbee.
You make a good point, but I think you misunderstand mine (although I prolly didn't explain it well). My problem is that facebook thinks they own all your content and information. They can take pictures that YOU have in your gallery, and use them at any time, in any way they want to. All the meta data about you, they will use however they want. That's where I get off the bus.
And it's techhelplist.com, recognize. (:
THL phish sticks
I did it with this.
What's funny is the delete form now says:
Deleting due to change in Terms of Service
Are you deleting because you are concerned about Facebook's Terms of Service?
This was a mistake that we have now corrected. You own the information you put on Facebook and you control what happens to it. We are sorry for the confusion.
- The Facebook Team
THL phish sticks
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.
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.
It's worse if they decide for some reason, which they will never tell you, to ban you. Your account will still be open and active and no amount of arguing with their support staff will convince them otherwise.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
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
Going off what the book was talking about, but yeah it was destruction of property that furthered a revolution.
To see a few of my Android apps goto: www.hartwired.com
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.
Suppose you have a long history of posts covering a particular topic with a large following of readers. You decide to compile them into a book and get it published. If it becomes popular (read: profitable) enough, you bet Facebook will pull the ToC out, dust if off, and demand at least a portion of the profits.
The reason you don't see the implications of this very often is there's usually no money in claiming ownership to material posted. But you'd better believe that once there's money in it, Facebook (or whoever else has this kind of ToC) will enforce it with teams of lawyers.
(the book example is just one example of how this could happen... there could be many more)
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
I actually did the deactivation first, and the comment I made in that form was "If I own the information, rewrite your ToS to state that." Then I was annoyed to find out I had to log back in to go through the delete form. So I deactivated, reactivated, and deleted. Now, I wonder if they really do delete the information (as in toss it in the trash and empty the trash) or just mark it as "deleted," (wink wink nudge nudge) as has been pointed out numerous times here.
I wonder how long it will be before we hear that Facebook has reverted back to the original ToS. My money says "never."
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
Posting here to undo accidental "-1 Redundant" moderation - meant to say "insightful".
I wish they would fix this issue :/
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?
Well, in Norway at least facebook groups do kick up a lot of dust and gets journalists interested in various causes.. Then politicians notice that someone actually care and they have to care :-p
From Facebook's ToS:
We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or delete portions of these Terms of Use at any time without further notice. If we do this, we will post the changes to these Terms of Use on this page and will indicate at the top of this page the date these terms were last revised. Your continued use of the Service or the Site after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms of Use.
Basically, if you continue to use the service, you have accepted the changes regardless of whether or not you knew about them. As far as Facebook is concerned, it is your responsibility to check the ToS date and look for changes before accessing the site.
Nothing is broken. It works fine so long as you are CAREFUL.
On a laptop, using a touch pad it is easy to accidently click in a popup. It just takes a light tap.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
Really? It's made national news outlets, /. (big deal), and has Facebook management scrambling to find a solution.
Organization is just a first step. Facebook is a tool (as in "something useful", not "male genitalia"). It's a very useful tool for those of us with friends a relatives scattered around the world. The way to bring about change without causing grief to both sides is to start a dialog. This is the first step. Next are threats. After that is termination. Ideally, before termination, part of the threat stage would be to build (or pretend to build) an alternate site.
I hope you don't manage anything professionally.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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."
Gracenote was accused of stealing the work of millions from CDDB.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.