[Your Cyber Persona] Facebook may own you, Twitterverse fears
February 16th, 2009 by Dave StudinskiThe world is aTwitter today following the discovery that Facebook may indeed screw you some day. The latest offense: It’s terms of service (TOS) agreement.
The following lines, as reports The Consumerist, have gone missing from the site’s previous TOS:
You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.
WebTechLaw.com gives an interpretation of the policy:
The license which you, as a Facebook user, grant to Facebook is very broad and it covers not just your content on Facebook but content you may have linked to from outside Facebook. What the terms don’t do is grant ownership but the license is so broad Facebook may as well own your content. What alarms me the most is that Facebook takes a license to the content you may only link to on Facebook and don’t upload to the service. This covers photos you may have stored on Flickr, videos on Zoopy or Vimeo and more. This virtual land grab makes these terms of use a particularly invasive set of permissions.
Thanks for the link back to my site. This is a challenging issue and clearly very controversial given the debate about the terms.
Paul Jacobson
February 17th, 2009