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Facebook Reverts ToS Change After User Uproar
rarel writes "CNN and other media outlets report that Facebook reverted their TOS update and went back to using the previous one. 'The site posted a brief message on users' home pages that said it was returning to its previous "Terms of Use" policy "while we resolve the issues that people have raised."' Facebook's controversial changes to its Terms of Service, previously commented on Slashdot, included a mention that (users) 'may remove (their) User Content from the Site at any time. ... However, (they) acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of (their) User Content,' triggering a massive uproar from users and privacy groups."
Never underestimate the ignorance of many lawyer types.
Or their ability to find BS stuff to do in order to validate their existence.
I won't even tell you about the lawyers I've had to battle (in 2 different corporations) because they wanted a complete list of all of the Open Source libraries and associated copyrights, BEFORE we even started the project.
They'd heard all about this "Open Source" thing and how evil it could be, after all, and wanted to protect the company.
They wouldn't green light the project until we provided that list, and yet we didn't even really know what we were building for them, never mind what we were using.
The nice thing, though, was that we picked every POSSIBLE library that we could find and submitted them and their copyrights for their analysis/aproval.
We had 4 developers spend an entire week doing that. At the client's expense.
The end result was that the lawyer eventually backed down on their request, but not until after we outlined all of the expenses incurred as a result of their initial request.
The owner of that company canned the lawyer shortly after that.
But that was still a solid week of wasted time that I'll never get back.
$0.02 (CDN)
So, clearly, they had some reason for wanting to make the change. I'm guessing that that reason, whatever it is, didn't just vanish.
The previous blog entry explains the reason: when you post your data it spills over to your friends accounts via inboxes etc. When you delete your account they don't want to have to hunt around all of your friends' and ex-friends' accounts to clean up all of that data, and they don't want to get in a legal mess by not cleaning it up.
I'm not sure I buy that completely: unless I use Facebook's messaging to send my email address say to a friend then it will only ever be stored against my record and deleting my record should clean it all up. And deleting all messages I created, and all notifications generated by my account should clean up the rest.