Facebook TOS raises some privacy issues
by Steve Ragan - Feb 17 2009, 12:25
Facebook has updated their TOS. Should you worry about what it says? (IMG:Facebook)
The Terms of Service (TOS) on Facebook highlight an important aspect of social networking and the right to privacy we can expect when using such services. The adage that 'if you post it online it's there forever' is true, but in Facebook’s case, you grant the network permission to do whatever it wants with your content, for as long as it wants.
An article in The Consumerist this past weekend pointed out a TOS change on Facebook. The section referenced in the article comes from the Licenses area of the TOS.
“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. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.”
The big hoopla comes from two sentences in the old Facebook TOS, which were 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.”
With the missing sentences, the new TOS essentially says that Facebook will, and is allowed, to keep and use anything you post to the site; for whatever the powers that be like, and for as long as they like. Previously, this permission ended when a user closed their account, and they allowed only archival permissions. Now that permission remains indefinitely.
To compare, a similar social networking site, Twitter, makes it clear that we own what we post, and once we remove our accounts, the content is gone.
“We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system,” explains the Twitter TOS as of 02-15-09.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter does not refer to using, copying, publishing, streaming, retaining, performing or displaying, scanning, reformatting, editing, or distributing, what we as users post online, in either the Twitter Privacy Policy, or the TOS.
So should we make a big deal out of the new TOS on Facebook? Not really. While there is some issue to be taken with how the service may or may not use the content of our accounts during the time we use the service or after, the larger issue remains.
That is, once we post it online, no matter where we post it, the information is retained for as long as an archive server exists.
If you want proof, the links below offer a great example of this:
Facebook TOS before the change
As you can see, thanks to one archive service, the old TOS on Facebook is still available.
This means, if we clean up our Facebook profiles hoping to prevent issues with finding a job, then the archive of that page may still come back to haunt us.
This is why security experts often warn about posting private and sensitive information online. Once it's out there, anyone can find it, and as the warning goes: anything you say (post) can and will be used against you.
For the record, Facebook has responded to all the attention the new TOS has prompted.
“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 created—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. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear,” wrote Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
“We still have work to do to communicate more clearly about these issues, and our terms are one example of this. Our philosophy that people own their information and control who they share it with has remained constant. A lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective of the rights we need to provide this service to you. Over time we will continue to clarify our positions and make the terms simpler.”
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