OnLife

Zuckerberg tries to defend Facebook TOS: Fails

You may not have heard about this, but Facebook have updated their Terms of Service on the quiet, adding some slightly scary terms along the lines of ‘All your content belong to us’.

The article by Mashable linked above should give you enough background on why this is bad news. The terms now read:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

So, great. Facebook owns all my content. That’s OK, they wouldn’t make such a huge TOS change without informing me though. Wait, what?!

Seriously, in what backwards world is it OK to change the terms of use for a web service overnight without informing your userbase? E-mail, banner ad, acceptance dialogue on login, any of these would have worked. But because of the controversy they no doubt knew it would cause, Zuckerberg and co slipped it in under the radar, giving users with content they’d rather not have circulated-or-sold-by-Facebook-to-whoever-they-feel-like no chance to pull photos, video or otherwise from the site before the new terms came into effect. If I upload a piece of design work or photography to Facebook, suddenly Facebook can use it however they like, for all time, even if I quit the service? Pish.

You can read Zuckerberg’s lame reply here.

Some excellent soundbites, including “Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment.”

Yeah, so that’s why there was absolutely no prompting for the acceptance of new Terms of Service? Just a sly alteration?

“I’ll post some more thoughts on openness and these other issues soon.”

I suppose it’s under the banner of ‘openness’ that such changes to the TOS were made, and because you’re all open and honest and lovely, that’s why you have the comments set to private on your blog post, Mark?

The fact of the matter is that even if what Zuckerberg alludes to in his blog post (that they’re not really evil, it’s the fault of the legalese that makes them sound evil) was the case, the legal wording of the TOS allows Facebook to use any of the content I own the rights to, that I have ever uploaded there, for whatever purpose they deem worthy, all without asking my permission. No amount of ‘we’re not that bad really’ is going to change this.

***Update: 18th February, and Facebook have rolled their TOS back to the original version while the controversy is sorted out, and the next revision apparently features less legalese. Hurrah!

* Ironically, I use this image without permission from The San Fransisco Sentinel. But that makes me lazy, not evil.

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