Facebook Relents on Terms of Service Updates Thanks To Community Pressure!

After all the ill will surrounding the recent modifications made to Facebook’s Terms of Service, the company relented thanks to the community pressure, reverting the document back to the September 2008 version while continuing to study how best to move forward. Each and every Facebook user has the community to thank for this move because it was the very community Facebook relies upon which allowed this crisis to be at least temporarily averted.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s young yet highly savvy CEO, posted his second blog entry in as many days, detailing what he considers to be a language problem with the updated Terms of Service. He essentially boiled the brouhaha down to a lack of transparency and a botched attempt to explain the reasoning behind the updated wording. For now, the TOS has been deprecated to the September 23, 2008 version – the published version prior to the February 4, 2009 modifications.

Facebook intends to engage the community while composing the updated Terms of Service, which is definitely forthcoming, though not in the immediate future.

Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. 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. Since this will be the governing document that we’ll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms.

You have my commitment that we’ll do all of these things, but in order to do them right it will take a little bit of time. We expect to complete this in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we’ve changed the terms back to what existed before the February 4th change, which was what most people asked us for and was the recommendation of the outside experts we consulted.

The company went so far as to setup a group called the Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, which is entirely dedicated to the TOS rewrite effort. If you are interested in being a part of that endeavor then you might consider joining the group and keeping a close eye on what transpires.

This entire effort was an excellent example of the power of groups, and the ability of a large assemblage of people dedicated to a single cause to band together as one voice, in the pursuit of righting a wrong. If we could only transpose this type of effort towards more important worldwide issues just imagine the amount of power average, ordinary citizens could wield!