AboutFace-Book
What lies behind the furor surrounding Facebook's ever-changing terms of service.
Zuckerberg and Facebook made an attempt just to “clarify” the change; in a blog entry, Zuckerberg said:
In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work. Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment.
Of course, that didn’t much help, since the natural response of anyone who has dealt with lawyers, upon hearing the phrase “the trust you place in us,” is to grab their wallet with both hands and run for the door. The kerfluffle continued until just short of midnight last night, when Zuckerberg made another announcement on his blog:
A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.
With the kerfluffle over for the moment, it’s a good time to look at how it happened. First of all, while it’s the automatic response of some people on the Internet to immediately erupt napalm from all orifices, it doesn’t appear that this was a conscious attempt by Facebook to grab up the rights to the members’ content.
Facebook really did have a problem, since the existing TOS says they no longer have a license to publish your materials once you remove them from your account; the thing is, another user may have attached comments or tagged a photograph or something. They don’t want to delete those if you leave; they get enough trouble from users about things they remove for other TOS violations. I’m sure someone realized that by including the language about terminating the license “except for archived copies” they exposed themselves to some risk, so the lawyers rewrote the TOS.
The thing is, every lawyer is taught to assert all the rights you can get, and then let the other person argue you down. By asserting complete ownership, they were ensuring that there was no other unexpected case, and hey, if it worked out that Facebook owned a license to photographs by the next Ansel Adams or prose by the next Steven King, well, all the better. The mystique of the law is such that most clients, especially naive ones, don’t question what the attorneys are doing, and it’s a rare attorney who considers what actually makes sense for the business in terms of public reaction.
So now, after a week of furor, and at least one late night for Zuckerman, the TOS is back to the original text, and Zuckerman has made a commitment in his blog to revise the TOS so it will “reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand.” At what cost, in terms of Facebook’s reputation and in bad PR, it’s hard to guess.
This sort of thing is certain to happen again, though, if not to Facebook then to someone else. The whole structure of having terms of service that a user can agree to with a click, or even just by reading a Web site’s content, and that can be changed from moment to moment with consent assumed, is inherently asymmetrical: a hundred times of day, the user is assumed to consent to individual terms of service written by attorneys in legalese that requires a big specialized vocabulary to understand.
So ask yourself: what contracts have I signed today?
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Charlie Martin is a Colorado computer scientist and freelance writer. He holds an MS in Computer Science from Duke University, where he spent six years with the National Biomedical Simulation Resource, Duke University Medical Center. Find him at http://chasrmartin.com, and on his blog at http://explorations.chasrmartin.com.
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14 Comments
1. ashok:Thank you for explaining this! I didn’t really look into it because I didn’t trust most of the people talking about it; it just sounded paranoid. I’ll be the first to admit I should understand these things better.
Feb 19, 2009 - 1:36 am 2. James:Facebook and myspace the dream of tyrants of old and yet to come. Fools put up everything about their lives for everyone to see. Doesn’t privacy matter?
Feb 19, 2009 - 5:11 am 3. Dave01:“First of all, while it’s the automatic response of some people on the Internet to immediately erupt napalm from all orifices…”
Classic. This sentence could be used to describe the response to any of hundreds of stories about the Internet.
Feb 19, 2009 - 5:13 am 4. e:Quite simply don’t put anything up there you wouldn’t put on a static webpage visible to everyone; because for a small fee anyone can see it.
Also many applications will snoop on you and sell that information as well. Hey, you gave it permission to access your profile.
The only privacy you can expect on the internet, is information you never put there in the first place.
Feb 19, 2009 - 5:28 am 5. Jaci:I saw all this going on (being a facebook user myself) and thought it was hilarious. Zuckerman et al have since released numerous statements saying “We don’t own your stuff, we never meant to own your stuff, it was poor wording, mea culpa.” And yet so many are still frothing at the mouth. Oh well. Some people just need to feed their victim complexes.
Feb 19, 2009 - 9:20 am 6. Peg C.:I marvel at the eagerness with which so many throw all privacy away. Facebook? Myspace? Don’t folks know all that crap can be used against them? No, thanks.
Feb 19, 2009 - 11:15 am 7. Charlie (Colorado):Peg, I think e’s point is better: don’t put information you want to be private in a public forum. (The opposite, as well: don’t expect privacy anywhere that a policeman could see you.) I am, among other things, a writer; I want people to see my writings and associate them with me, as that’s how I get work. On the other hand, I don’t want someone to feel they can use a legal trick to assert their ownership over that work. A photographer wants to be able to get people to see photographs.
The Facebook dispute isn’t about privacy, it’s about the right to own your own creations.
Feb 19, 2009 - 11:56 am 8. dancingnancie3:This just goes to show that you need to not only watch what information you post on the internet, but read through the terms and conditions before just clicking through. Facebook has an agenda… it was only a matter of time before they tried to implement something like this. Of course, I didn’t think about that when i joined facebook a few years ago.
Feb 19, 2009 - 4:04 pm 9. personal trainers austin:Good information on Facebook, thanks.
Feb 19, 2009 - 6:56 pm 10. Susan Katz Keating:You have explained an issue I didn’t understand. Thank you!
Feb 20, 2009 - 8:21 am 11. Joseph:I think you exceeded your allowed use of the word “kerfluffle” in this article.
Feb 20, 2009 - 1:32 pm 12. Utopia Parkway:Zuckerman. Zuckerberg. What’s the difference?
Feb 20, 2009 - 5:54 pm 13. coffee:the fact that Facebook change their TOS back so quickly is an indication that they knew they were doing something wrong, or at least “a little off”
Feb 22, 2009 - 11:25 am 14. zplis | what's the latest?:Thanks for sharing this. Even though i haven’t read the TOS, I’m still concern about my privacy. Good thing I haven’t uploaded any of my works and photos of me and my loved ones.
Many of my friends ask me where’s your picture? I said, I’m sorry, i don’t have any pictures in my computer.
We just don’t know where will facebook use our information.
Thanks a lot for this
Mar 22, 2009 - 4:56 am