Facbook ain’t -that- evil after all
A few weeks or so ago, Facebook suddenly decided to update, or rather revise, their Terms of Service. I won’t bother to copy what they added here, since it’s written in lengthy, complicated, and downright anal terms-of-use-language (ie. they use 3 sentences to reiterate the same thing and 10 different “synonyms” of sorts to make sure they cover every single aspect they want to). Basically, they added a few paragraphs which explicitly stated that Facebook owned whatever content you uploaded (pictures, videos, etc.) and could do whatever they wanted to do with it (which was where they had to use 10+ words to describe what they could do with it), even if you deleted your account!!!
*Panic and chaos ensues*
Seriously people, since when has social networking sites like Facebook/Friendster NOT owned your photos. You upload them to their server so that your friends can view them, hasn’t it ever occured to you that you’re granting them the license to display these images to the public in the first place? Even if they decided to sell your media to other companies or whatsoever, do you really think you would have heard about it? Besides, a majority of the media uploaded on Facebook is usually personal pictures and videos of friends and family, who would gain much from your 10th grade picture of you crying or whatever?
Nevertheless, there was a huge outcry all over the internet. Fueled by the annoymity of internet usernames, people with nicknames along the lines of DeathSlayer28 and PwettyGurl82 were busy growing balls of steel and telling Facebook to go “burn and die”. Everyone started thinking Facebook would really want to steal their unglam pictures and videos to sell to marketting companies or something. It seems like everyone never realised that things have been like that all along, since by uploading the pictures to Facebook and letting all your friends view them you’re basically granting them the license to do a hell lot with your media anyway.
Despite the founder of Facebook himself (Mark SZuckerberg) clarifying things in this blog post dated Febrary 17th, stating about how Facebook requires such a license to be allowed to publicise your media, Facebook has ultimately decided to revert to it’s old ToS for now… which doesn’t really make much of a difference really. According to this other blog post that Zuckerberg posted roughly 24 hours before the previous one, he stated that Facebook is reverting back to the original ToS while they craft out a new one that will explain more clearly what they meant by having control over people’s media. They only updated the ToS in the first place to make it clearer as to what control they had over the media.
The thing is, all Facebook users (like myself) can do is to trust them. I mean we’re giving away all our personal information to a completely foreign website, there’s really no guarentee that they’re not selling off our information under the table without anyone knowing. When it comes to the internet, one really has no choice but to trust whatever site you’re giving away your information to. All in all, there’s really no point in whining about it.
At least Facebook is willing to do something about it and are listening to what its users have to say.
