Facebook users get their knickers in a twist

So Facebook has listened to the baying masses and temporarily reverted to old terms of service - the ones which assured users that once they de-activated their accounts, Facebook would no longer have a licence to do basically whatever it liked with their content on the site.

It was a smart move, I suppose, by Mark Zuckerberg and his team given the deafening level of protests about the (mostly) unheralded change to the terms of service. Facebook will now take a few weeks to come back with some new, hopefully clearer, legalese which people will find more acceptable.

I can't help thinking that most of the furore is not about the change in the terms but the realisation by many Facebook users that, actually, yes, when you post something on Facebook you are giving it to Facebook, in theory, to use as they will. It is their site and what you put up there is no longer just yours - it is theirs. Of course, Facebook is swift to reassure users that they have no intention of putting all this content to some nefarious use. But the truth is - we simply have to trust their word on that.

One of the basic truths of the web is that you give up data to websites so you can use their services. This is true in particular of social networking sites like Facebook where the point is to share - ie to spread content. Once you let it go - you no longer have full control over your content online. The internet is interactive and other people are going to get involved.

People should realise that in this context, online privacy is a contradiction in terms. If you want to keep something truly private, don't post it online - that is the only basic rule to follow.

Now Zuckerberg will go away and try to work out how he could have avoided all this fuss. I suppose Facebook should have seen all this coming and made a better job of communicating the change to its terms of service. When the worlds of lawyers and consumer privacy rights collide, it is always tricky.

As Zuckerberg noted in a blog post, when he was trying to damp down the fuss:

"People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people’s information. These two positions are at odds with each other."

Facebook, with its huge international user base, is at the sharp end of trying to solve this issue.

Comments

[Matt Wardman]

>I suppose Facebook should have seen all this coming and made a better job of communicating the change to its terms of service.

No. They should have come up with Terms of Service that did not trample over their users.

[coffee]

the fact that Facebook change their TOS back so quickly is an indication that they knew they were wrong in the first place