The Facebook shell game continues
Just a side note – I have been a little lapse in my posting here today mainly because my body figured I’d been burning too many candles from to many ends and as a result I’ve been having to spend much of yesterday and the day before getting some rest. Having heart problems hasn’t helped matters either so my wife put her foot down and said enough. Hopefully things will return to normal tomorrow – in the meantime on with the post I tried to get out earlier.
Well I guess everyone who jumped on the slap Facebook around a little bandwagon is giving themselves all a bunch of fives and pat on the back on how they have through the power of social media caused the giant of Social Media to retreat from their new terms of service. The champagne corks are popping and the obituaries for a truly onerous TOS when the fact is that nothing really has changed one bit. For as bad as their new terms of service may have seemed to be the one that it was spawned from really isn’t all that much better.
The previous TOS; courtesy of Consumerist, and now the one they say they are temporarily returning to until they can come of with something better goes like this
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.
Then this was the new and improved TOS that got everyone in an uproar
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.
The only difference is that the old TOS said that Facebook could only use your – their property as allowed by your privacy setting or until you left the service by deleting your account. Now let’s face it the number of people of people in general probably won’t know what their privacy settings page looked which means for I would estimate 99% of the people using Facebook that the service has free rein with your – their content.
As for being able to delete your account and thereby removing any of your data for Facebook to be able to use is like playing hide ‘n go seek. Just ask Jason Kaneshiro over at webomatica the problems he had trying to delete his account. So again chances are that the vast majority of people will just stop using Facebook but that in turns still leaves their data there for Facebook to use as it sees fit.
In the end I don’t foresee anything about Facebook’s attempt to get; and keep, control over all the data you put into the system. The only thing that will change is the language used in the TOS. Other than that it will be business as usually – trying to figure out how to make money from all that data of yours err theirs. As Duncan said yesterday
The key with the backflip is to not be fooled. Some are already calling this a user led victory, but the only difference today is that Facebook can’t resell your content if you quit the site, and lets face it, how many people are going to quit the currently most popular social networking site on the planet? The crux of the problem remains: Facebook claiming full rights to do as they please with your content.
