Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forev

[LightBearer]

Anybody use Facebook? Buahahaha....

Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.”

Chris Walters
The Consumerist
February 17, 2009

This post has generated a lot of responses, including from Facebook. Check them out here.

Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.

Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later.* Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

That language is the same as in the old TOS, but there was an important couple of lines at the end of that section that have been removed:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Furthermore, the "Termination" section near the end of the TOS states:


The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.

Make sure you never upload anything you don’t feel comfortable giving away forever, because it’s Facebook’s now.

(Note that as several readers have pointed out, this seems to be subject to your privacy settings, so anything you’ve protected from full public view doesn’t seem to be usable in other ways regardless.)

Oh, you also agree to arbitration, naturally. Have fun with that.

Update: Several Facebook groups have formed to protest the new TOS:
"People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)"
"FACEBOOK OWNS YOU: Protest the New Changes to the TOS!"
"Those against Facebook’s new TOS!"


Update 2: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has posted a response on the Facebook blog. A crude summary: "trust us, we’re not doing this to profit from you, it’s so we are legally protected as we enable you to share content with other users and services." His point, I think, is that there are interesting issues of ownership and rights clearance when you’re dealing with content shared in a social network:

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.


Update 3: I just found this clarification posted earlier this afternoon on The Industry Standard. It was emailed to them by a Facebook representative and seems to confirm that your privacy settings trump all else:

We are not claiming and have never claimed ownership of material that users upload. The new Terms were clarified to be more consistent with the behavior of the site. That is, if you send a message to another user (or post to their wall, etc…), that content might not be removed by Facebook if you delete your account (but can be deleted by your friend). Furthermore, it is important to note that this license is made subject to the user’s privacy settings. So any limitations that a user puts on display of the relevant content (e.g. To specific friends) are respected by Facebook. Also, the license only allows us to use the info "in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof." Users generally expect and understand this behavior as it has been a common practice for web services since the advent of webmail. For example, if you send a message to a friend on a webmail service, that service will not delete that message from your friend’s inbox if you delete your account.

http://www.infowars.com/facebooks-n...o-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever/

 

[Stella_Hardon]

That is why I don't have that garbage

People are in my past for a reason, and anyone who wants to get a hold of me that bad can contact a mutual friend..if we have no mutual friends there is a reason for that

I think face book is a government conspiracy...(seriously)

It is .. From ars technicia

-------------------------------------------------------------

he CIA has a Facebook page. It invites students to apply for the National Clandestine Service. It has 2,844 friends. Is this interesting? Not really; the Agency is a well-known college recruiter already, visiting campuses to find promising recruits and hosting a rigorous two-summer internship for students. But it does raise the question: Is a government that seems fixated on using automated surveillance to understand the social links between people hoping to tap social networking sites for data?

Some conspiracy theorists say yes, but go even further: Facebook is itself a government-funded project. To accept this thesis, you have to believe that because one guy at one venture capital investor in Facebook sits on another, unrelated board on which Gilman Louie, former head of In-Q-Tel (formely In-Q-IT), also sat, the CIA is running (or at least funding) Facebook. It also helps if you believe that "the Bush regime is a megalomaniacal cabal of mass murderers who want to crush all internal dissent, and like all dictatorial regimes, the first place they will look is students."

Fortunately, the student slaughters have not yet started, but some better-attested information about the government's interest in social networking did come to light last year. In an academic paper (PDF), partially funded by the NSA's ARDA program (now called the Disruptive Technology Office), the authors showed how social networks gleaned from the Semantic Web could be used to identify conflicts of interest among academic peer reviewers.

The ARDA project that helped to fund the research was called "An Ontological Approach to Financial Analysis & Monitoring." The goal seems to have been to use this sort of social-networking technology to keep money from flowing into the hands of terror groups, mobsters, and other unsavory characters who need to launder their cash. The paper notes that this is made more difficult by a lack of social-networking data from which to work, but the authors suggest that publicly-available networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster could help to supply that information.

Because those sites do contain such a wealth of personal information, along with information about a person's friends, relatives, and acquaintances, it would certainly not be out of the question for the government to attempt to harvest the data for its own use (a move that would not necessarily require any cooperation from the site operators). If this sounds like a lot of work for a potentially tiny payoff, consider that the government has been running a massive domestic telecommunications spy program with enterprise-grade equipment installed around the country, all apparently designed to allow for eavesdropping (natch) but also for building models of social networks that might help to identify terrorist cells and their supporters.

Are Facebook et al. actually CIA/NSA-backed companies that the agencies are using to create massive databases on Americans without having to deal with that pesky congressional oversight? Without any evidence of this, it seems grossly unlikely. If it does turn out to be true that the government was behind the creation of such popular, simple-to-use programs that millions of people voluntarily return to again and again, the people bureaucrats behind them need to be moved immediately into upper-level management at the IRS and Social Security Administration.

Far more likely is that young entrepreneurs hit on a few good ideas, and the government now sees an opportunity. Whether that opportunity can be used to prevent any actual crimes remains to be seen.

 

[FortunateOne]

It is the complete lack of common sense by people who join up and post all kinds of pics and personal info that floors me. Unless you are in sales and/or trying to promote or support something, I can see nothing good coming from this kind of exposure.

 

[LightBearer]

Whoa Stella_Hardon you sound like an anarchist talking about the CIA. The CIA doesnt exist, anyone who thinks so is with Al CIA-duhhhh, I mean Alqaeda!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

 

[jim]

Update

From Facebook:

Terms of Use Update


Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, 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.

If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

 

[bruce_lee]

Personally I think facebook is a really good networking site. I am a student so it provides plenty of opportunities to link up with other students in your class to trade notes and inquire about missed lectures. On a side note it really helps connect people or friends that have moved away because of school and work. Instead of emailing me a huge file full of pictures I can just go on his wall and see what he's been up to, as well as leave him a note.

Another good thing is when you pick up a girl at the club you can facebook her to make sure you didn't wear your beer goggles the night before before you call her. As well you can make sure you don't have friends in common because then everyone will know you are a slut or a dirt bag.

All in all I think the benefits outweigh the negatives. I'm not miley Cyrus so nobody cares if I drink beers till I'm laying on granville naked. And my employer isn't the CIA so have my pictures, and my hotmail address which is already full of Viagra ads.

 

[Katlyn]

Don't post anything on the internet you don't want someone to steal, it's pretty simple actually.

No matter what someone's terms of services are, as a simply little person if anyone chose to steal my shit I couldn't afford to take them to court anyway so terms of services, etc don't really matter to me.

As for facebook, it is good and bad. Good if you are in a networking business bad if you don't really give a shit about your highschool classmates but they keep adding you anyway. I had an account and 400 "friends", most of whom probably would not have known my last name if it weren't for the site. Now I'm on there under a fake name and have 14 FRIENDS whom I actually know and love.

Facebook is privately owned still by whatever the original guy's name is. The CIA being behind it apparently is true of Myspace but as of yet Facebook has not given up much control and instead has investors who only have access to the content in the same way other companies do. However, saying this of course, there is an amazing amount of statistical data available. Facebook's perceived value is based on the fact that they are the only company in the world with this much statistical data but they are floundering trying to find ways to earn money with it without violating our privacy. As yet they are still in the red while companies that use their platform are profitting tremendously.

 

[Purrr VertIcal]

I've waved this Flag before.

In this Day and Age of identity theft,
and of Corporate Greed,
and Corporate and Governmental infringements and violations of Privacy,

I am all in favor of fighting back,
in the name of defending your identity and preserving your liberty.

I believe in deliberate disinformation,
tagging sites with that specific unique disinformation so you know, if it comes back to bite yo, where and who did it.

And I use an alias on Facebook.

I suggest, at a minimum, you slightly alter the spelling of your name.
Change 'Smith' to 'Smyth', for example. If you get a letter in the snail mail with that spelling, you'll know where it was sourced.

Inform your friends, those who are on a -

NEED TO KNOW Basis, who will

respect your identity.

 

[Purrr VertIcal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/technology/internet/19facebook.html?pagewanted=print