What do you think of the new Facebook Terms Of Service?

I hate Facebook for the most part and MySpace completely. It won’t really affect me.

Its kind of douchey of them.

i think it’s scary; but stuff like this usually stokes someone into creating the “next-gen” of whatever.

They need to start making money. Your data is the only thing of value they have.

@johnpowell

I thought FB made lots of money from adverts on their site.

I wonder if it’s written to include media hosted off-site like RSS feeds from my blog or my Flickr feed. Are they saying they now own perpetual rights to my high school photos? I don’t think so.

@PupnTaco Yes, they own your photos that you took while you were out drinking with your buddies, the RSS that was affiliated with your Facebook account, and any other data that is associated with your account.

@seekingwolf They still bleed money.. Twitter is still broke. The advertising thing isn’t really working out so well. Selling your data is more likely get you some bucks.

edit :: and by broke I mean not making money. But idiots will still pump cash into them.

@johnpowell

Yeah, I guess that makes sense, esp. in today’s economy.

actually, the newest time magazine (the one with the article about faith and wellness or something on the cover) has an article about how FB is flourishing while other social networks have flattened out.

I think people are worrying a tad too much about it. The TOS can only harm you if you have crappy privacy levels. Set your privacy to what you want, and that stuff will not get saved. Check the updates on this article to see what I mean. Here’s what Mark posted about it on his blog earlier today.

Didn’t Google Chrome have something similar in it’s EULA?

@Anaphase I believe Google Chrome has a feature that collected information on users’ browsing history. Here’s a follow-up to some of those issues: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-09-n68.html

While I’m not a lawyer, I believe all Facebook requires from users is a license to distribute their content to others according to the user’s privacy settings. The wording they currently use is CYA weasel speak to mitigate liability, and Facebook should just take some responsibility for being reasonable custodians of that data.

Facebook also needs to state explicitly how they use demographic and other data to target advertising and how much of that data is shared with advertisers/partners on individual users and in aggregate. A lot of confusion still exists on this.

Privacy advocates need to find ways of telling people what the consequences of putting their information on these sites really is. People (especially older, less social networking-savvy people) have little sympathy for those that don’t get hired for a job because their status updates are filled with drunken slurs, but how would it feel if an employer passed on a candidate because the candidate joined a cause or mentioned attending a rally for something that the employer didn’t agree with?

I don’t care about facebook.

I care most about the fact that such a major change to the TOS was slipped in without notice.

I blogged about it here

This issue has come up in the past, and it also boiled down to the same thing. Facebook needs you to grant it a license for your media in order for Facebook to work. They are not actively trying to steal your content. Mark’s blog post gives a great example of Facebook’s email system in this regard. They don’t intend on taking all your drinking or high school photos and compiling them into a Facebook Best Of Photos album and give it away as a promotional item. But technically the new terms of service would allow them to do just such a thing, provided you have not restricted your profile. If you have restricted your profile, Facebook will comply with your restrictions – so if you have your profile set to Friends Only, Facebook would not be able to include your drinking photos in the above mentioned promo photo album unless they were ONLY giving the album to your friends.

When it comes to posting external stuff on Facebook, such as someone submitting your website or video as a Posted Item, Facebook does not own your site. But it does own the blurb that it autogenerates with a picture of your item and a text summary. That’s completely reasonable for them to do.

But at the same time, Facebook is going to be expanding its ad market rapidly (it’s one of the few sites left where advertising is actually a viable market, if done well). It’s also going to be making its own ads to promote the Site (the new terms of service clearly point to them taking steps in such a direction). I mean, let’s be clear here, Facebook is a private company looking to make money. Servers don’t magically appear whenever another one dies, it takes money to buy one, and money to pay for the bandwidth they use. Especially in this coming year, as the venture capital funds dry up, Facebook will be trying to turn any profit to show that it’s sustainable.

I don’t really care. Everything i upload to their servers is their property and i don’t expect it to be otherwise. I’m not paranoid on this…

@wilhel1812 I think it’s pretty clear that content generators such as videographers and photographers who have uploaded their work to Facebook are not being ‘paranoid’ when they observe that technically the wording of the Facebook TOS would allow Zuckerberg and co to redistribute and utilize their work in whatever way they see fit with no way of retracting the permission for them to do so.

For average joe, it mostly doesn’t matter, as @dynamicduo points out in a GA above. For content owners who might want to retain controls, it does.

For facebook to be able to display your pictures on your profile, they have to own the pictures. For other people to be able to “see” your profile, facebook has to create a website with your content on it. If they didn’t own it, people would sue, just because they even have a profile. Yeah it’d be a dumb lawsuit, but that’s what this protects.

EDIT: Zuckerman has a blog post about it. http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54434097130

I don’t think this will protect them as much as they think. I know for a fact that they let 12 year old girls register for the site. I’ll bet there are kids as young as 9 and 10 registered there. In any case, from ages 13 through 16, and maybe through 18, these kids are minors, and they may upload private stuff from their parents without their parents knowing. If that gets out and causes embarrassment, I don’t think the TOS would protect them from a suit.

I think it is their responsibility to make sure everyone is of an age to assent to the TOS, or to get a parental cosigner. Of course, that’s pretty much impossible until we get secure digital signatures that contain untamperable personal information, such as DOB. I don’t see how we could get such a system, unless it was on a chip embedded in your body, and even then, I bet criminals would steal them.

@daloon, you raise an interesting point. Here’s another point to consider. Something that’s making the news a lot nowadays are young teens getting charged with child pornography charges for taking cellphone pictures of their same aged girlfriends. I would find it likely that Facebook may be used for similar things, maybe not naked pictures but certainly pictures of illegal actions like underage drinking or pot smoking, as time goes on if more people join and use the network without realizing the possible consequences of uploading such evidence.

There’s really no secure and non-intrusive way of creating an aged-verified system. Many would suggest some massive government system that may very well end up hacked or corrupted. Not to mention the implications of tying your real life identity to your online account at Site X, which is something I have purposely not chosen to do here. But this is another issue totally: comparing the benefits and losses of having a non-anonymous internet.

@dynamicduo: I think you should ask a couple of questions:

1) What are the benefits and losses of a non-anonymous internet?

2) If underage kids take pictures of themselves or other underage kids and put those pictures on the internet, is that child pornography?

Literally two minutes ago, Facebook just rolled back to their previous ToS in response to all the drama. CEO Mark Zuckerberg just posted:

A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

The whole thing is here: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54746167130

Good move, IMO. The new terms were exploitive.

Moreso than the terms being exploitative was the fact that they were put into place with no announcement or no consulting of the masses. I found Mark’s statement about how Facebook would be the 6th most populated country to be very interesting, and it seems they have really taken what this means to heart. Unlike a country, people can leave Facebook anytime they want to.

@richardhenry This is great news! And to think I almost deleted my account.

It’s really great to see a big company think on their feet.

I don’t think for a minute that they ever intended to use peoples’ content in the ways suggested – the backlash if they ever did would derail the company forever. Using peoples’ private and protected content in your marketing materials, or selling or republishing it, isn’t the best thing to do if you would like to attract more users and retain your existing ones and to suggest otherwise is silliness.

It’s worth thinking about the contracts that you make your users sign though, and I’m glad that they’re not just tossing it around and are in the process of making the language more clear and more understandable.

I met a bunch of the Facebook team at FOWA London last year, and they’re really good guys. I’m glad that they’re handling this mistake well.

Clear and well-informed thinking, RichardHenry. Thanks all for sorting this out for me and us!

I deleted my Facebook account months ago, and the MySpace page i have only gets a quarterly visit from me. As Elmer Fudd would say “SQwuue em!”