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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.
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
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
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."