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Facebook: oh never mind about that content thing

Written on
Feb 17, 2009 
Author
Edward Barrera  |
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Facebook: oh never mind about that content thing

facebook_small.jpgADOTAS — Don’t mess with Facebook users.

You would think that Facebook would know that by now, but apparently not. The blogosphere the last few days went crazy after noticing that the social network had changed its terms of service. It appeared to say that it would own your rights to old content even if you closed the account.

Even Mark Zuckerberg posted a clarifying note yesterday, saying, ” Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

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.

In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want.”

Facebook also emailed a response to the Industry Standard adding that it was not claiming and have never claimed ownership of material that users upload. The new Terms were clarified to be more consistent with the behavior of the site.”

I was amused by Zuckerberg’s admission that the company has “to communicate more clearly about these issues.”

– Express your opinion, comment below.





Reader Comments.

FB is backtracking…never trust the small print

Posted by jay bee | 12:51 pm on February 17, 2009.

I have always been an advocate of using FB, Myspace, etc. for your own gain. They would like to use and seize “UCG” but who came up with the ideas and content in the first place? Always give these places a tease if you are promoting content – then link to your own site. Control your content and use the others like they try to use you.

Posted by AK Works | 1:35 pm on February 17, 2009.

Ak,
you’re probably right. I’ve seen people tease their stuff and then post a shortened url. I don’t normally do that but maybe I should.

Posted by Edward Barrera | 2:44 pm on February 17, 2009.

This is good… Next FB would be selling old abandoned information for storage fees just like the storage shed business does! :>)

Rod Cook

Posted by rodcook | 3:40 pm on February 17, 2009.

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