Barbara Feldman: Facebook's New Terms of Service

Facebook's New Terms of Service

Facebook's new Terms of Service have created a firestorm across the web, as bloggers and Facebook members sound off on whether this is completely evil or no big deal. Here's what happened.

Facebook's TOS always said that they have a perpetual license to anything you post on Facebook (subject to your privacy settings) but when you cancel your account, their rights to that content are terminated. At the beginning of February, however, the couple of sentences about what happens when you delete an account have been removed from the TOS, implying that Facebook has rights to your content in perpetuity, even after you remove that content from Facebook.

Notice, however, the parenthetical remark "subject to your privacy settings"? That seems to imply that if your Facebook content is NOT public, then Facebook can't do much with it.

Here, however, are a few people who seem to think this is still a pretty big deal. Here are a few of them:

Julius Harper and People Against the New Terms of Service is a Facebook group with 49,405 members (as of this writing.)

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is preparing to file a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over Facebook's updated licenses.

What do you think? Let me know by posting a comment here. Oh .. and just to be clear, anything you post belongs to me :)

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