Just recently I read a rather disturbing article about Facebook’s new terms of use. Facebook, with members now numbering over 175 million, used to have a pretty straight forward user agreement. If you close your account on their network, any rights they claim to the original content you upload would expire. Not anymore.
Straight from the Facebook’s new terms of use:
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.
And the key lines at the end of the passage:
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.
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.
So to paraphrase; if you upload anything on Facebook, it’s theirs. So if you plan on uploading pictures you will want to remove, 5, 10, 100 years later, forget it.
Now, apparently, it not quite as extreme as it may sound. At least, I hope so. Apparently all of this is subject to your user settings, so if you set that only your friends could view your pictures, they can’t really do anything with any images they archive.
Nevertheless, the announcement of the discovery of this new change has prompted a large outcry of facebook users. While drafting an official response, a Facebook representative released this statement to quell the swarm of complaints.
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.
So is Facebook’s new terms of use a sign of a powerful company turning into a oppressive regime? Or was its intention in fact to clear up any possible confusion such as in the situation that the representative describes? In either case, the outcry of users was certainly a situation of agency being exercised, forcing Facebook to scramble and release a response.
2 comments:
Whoaaaaa, Matt quite the lengthy post. Great stuff, though I think I may have paid more attention had it been summarized. It's fascinating how Americans are often turned-off by bulk and large amounts of texts. Sometimes, it can be simple when it is often quite complex.
I was just reading an article about this as well. I had a friend who deactivated their facebook a few months ago and recently returned- horrified that not one bit of their information had left the facebook servers. It's interesting that if you look at something as seemingly harmless as facebook with a critical eye, it's "oppresive" moves become very apparent. Good find.
Post a Comment