Money at handBy rough estimates, the number of rioters over Facebook’s sudden change in ‘terms of use’ amounted to less than 1% of the entire Facebook community. And all the blogs (including ours) that reported the Facebook hoopla have ignited nothing more than a small containable dumpster fire.

Regardless of the final legal wording – Facebook and many other [free and paid] online services will continue to get away with murder for the unforeseeable future. These services ‘will’ effectively co-own your online stuff for as long as you let them.


Remember: Even after this latest fiasco – Facebook will continue to retain the right to share whatever information you upload to their site — whether it’s your home video, photos of your frat party or just a private love letter to your girlfriend. Facebook can legally put ‘your’ data to work for ‘their’ benefit. And the only surefire way around being owned like this by Facebook and other providers is to:

Delete your content off the internet – NOW.

What Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO) did to raise cane was remove this one clause from Facebook’s terms of use:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time.

This [problematic-for-Facebook] clause effectively gave ‘you’ the right to manage your ‘own’ Facebook data how you wanted. But really, it didn’t and it never will. As it won’t for many other online service including the likes of LinkedIn, flickr, MySpace, deviantART, Yahoo!, and I’m sure many others.

Even though this [now famous] clause is back in Facebook’s terms of use, your photos, video and posts on Facebook’s servers are still co-owned by Facebook.

Facebook puts it this way:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof….

Don’t be fooled. As I mentioned earlier, Facebook isn’t the only user-driven website to consume, repackage and [may already be] displaying your content anywhere in the world they see fit. Many of the major sites — like flickr, MySpace, YouTube, Google, and Yahoo! all cover their asses with the same fine print and only briefly shove it in your face when you sign up to use their service. They gamble that you won’t feel strongly enough to [squint and] read their terms. They bet you would rather get past the formalities and move on with using their service — all along planning how to exploit your family photos. Upload at your own risk.