Facebook Drama

Facebook’s recently celebrated its 5th birthday (6/2/09) and there are articles all over the internet about it. I’ve never been that great a fan of Facebook due to the immense clutter in the interface (my opinion) which I still can’t get a hang of. There are those pesky applications floating around too that are just mainly for entertainment. Connect with people? Yea, I suppose it does that job alright.

I came across this one article though that talks about some of the challenges Facebook has to face in order to survive the next five years. Obviously one of the biggest problems is how to start making it profitable without causing a massive uproar in the Facebook community about how their privacy rights are being violated. But it’s a problem that needs to be solved eventually (and soon) because a lot of investors have put in money to developing Facebook and they want to see some return on their investment.

What interests me though is the part where the author of the article talks about the host (Facebook in this case) owns or at least retains control of information that users input:

That isn’t, of course, the case. Trawl the small print of most user-content site and you will see – understandably when a service is provided for free – that the host owns, or at least retains control of, the information users carefully input. Bear that in mind when you entrust your entire photo collection to Flickr.

I don’t know about you but I seldom, if ever read the user agreement portion when I sign up for services (email, social sites, etc). So just to validate this I decided to take a look and see what was in Facebook’s user agreement and privacy policy. Here’s what I found:

And in case you were wondering what the definition of user content for Facebook is:

Ok, so it doesn’t quite say (to my understanding) that they own the content I submit to Facebook. It does say that they reserve the right to remove or disable access to any User Content which I suppose is a form of control. They also say that what happens to you as a result of your content is not their problem either. Hmm, maybe I should ditch that Calendar application I have in Facebook which contains people’s birthdays. Haha. It’s just about the only application I keep though. I know people use lots more. I also know people aren’t really concerned about security so they will think it’s no biggie. Until something bad happens. Like the story I recently read of a guy who posted on Facebook status that he was still hung over and called in sick. (His boss read about it and the guy subsequently got fired)

Privacy, a lot of the time, can be an illusion. For most, it’s taken for granted. You don’t know what you have till it’s taken away huh?

This week, it seems Facebook tried to change its Terms of Service (TOS).

‘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.’

Bad move. Right when everyone’s on the watch for funny business too. Everyone’s already paranoid as it is about having their content misused. Anyways, because of the huge number of complaints lodged by users, Facebook has retracted the modified TOS and reverted to the old one. Some are in the opinion that it’s a lot of hoo ha about nothing. I’ll just wait and see what happens and reserve judgment for now.

Source articles:

Five years of Facebook. How will it last five more?
Facebook’s New Terms of Service

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