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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."
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.
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";
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!
Don't forget, it's not unified protest either. There'll be a dozen groups "protesting" the same thing because someone didn't think about using the search feature.
If you don't believe me, look for groups against duplicate groups.
I'm torn. I would never join Facebook, but now I want to so I can be part of this group. Is there also a group for people who will never join Facebook?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I only use myspace, gmail + other google services, LinkedIn, and twitter. They certainly don't fit your description, so I'm good.
pants = British for rubbish
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 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?
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).
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Actually, Hotmail (re)enabled POP3 recently.
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.
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.
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.
I don't entirely disagree, but it's worth noting that "legalese" is used because it is highly specific in a way that vernacular English simply is not. There are words, terms, and concepts only found in legalese that have highly precise definitions that help avoid gnarly court battles.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
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?
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
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.
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.
" 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%?
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.