Yesterday Facebook released the first drafts of their principles that “will guide development of the service”, and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. It reminds me that I’ve been meaning to post about the kerfuffle from a few weeks ago over Facebook changing its Terms of Service. Facebook changed the terms without making a big announcement and without asking users to renew their acceptance of the terms and some users flipped a lid about it. (I think that this whole “controversy” would have been kept at bay if Facebook had just been upfront about the change–users wouldn’t feel that they were being sneaky about it and lawyers wouldn’t be at the ready to decide if simply logging in was an acceptance of the new terms. But they weren’t, and so lots of users threw fits.) Was that reaction warranted?
The changes to the ToS were specifically about how Facebook dealt with users’ information after accounts had been deleted, as a way of, for example, allowing users to retain copies of emails received from users who have since deleted their accounts. A lot of Facebook users, egged on by news coverage, feverishly clicked away to join groups that would “let Facebook know” that they disagreed with the new terms of service. Or at least what they’d heard through the grapevine about the new terms of service (“OMG! Facebook owns you 4-Ever!”). Or what the kid who created the group said the new terms were about. (You know, the kid who wrote the description that misuses “there” for “their” but who is somehow an expert on legal documents pertaining to Internet privacy.)
Me? It doesn’t bug me. I determined long, long ago that the Interwebs keeps everything somewhere in its vast memory and you should never assume that anything you put out there is private or temporary. Here’s what DOES bug me—hypocrisy.
Just taking a look among my Facebook friends, the same people who got agitated about Facebook “invading their privacy” are the ones who’ve posted half-naked, drunken pictures of themselves, and status updates telling the world how much they hate their jobs. (This kid was fired from said job for complaining about it on Facebook.) In the course of just a few days, one friend joined an anti-ToS group AND posted one of those memes in which she talks about the kind of underwear she wears (barf). Countless others are Gmail users, which seems to say that allowing Facebook to save copies of emails is bad, but allowing Google to search the content of your email in order to serve up targeted advertising is okay. And others have sent me vacation pictures via Picasa web albums where they haven’t employed the “all rights reserved” feature, yet they’re ticked that Facebook might save a copy of their profile picture.
As we all know, Facebook caved to the pressure and negative press–despite their efforts to explain what the new Terms really meant for users—and reverted to the old terms while users help them construct these new principles, rights, and responsibilities. In the rights and responsibilities document, Facebook addressed users’ concerns about the “perpetual” and “irrevocable” license that is granted and makes it clear “that this license ends when you delete your content or your account. And finally, we make it clear that we can only use your content in a manner consistent with your privacy and application settings.”
I hope those folks are content with the new proposals. And if these people were comfortable with the content they posted before, I’m frightened to think of what they might feel comfortable posting now.