Facebook faced down: new TOS tossed
By John Lister
Facebook has backed down over plans which critics said could give it complete control over use of uploaded material even after users canceled accounts. But the site hasn’t ruled out making such changes later on.
As Dave Parrack reported yesterday, Facebook’s conditions already give it the right to use anything members upload, including photographs and blog-style posts. The only exception is material where users specifically mark it as only viewable by their Facebook friends.
The new rules would have allowed the site to carry on using material even after users canceled their accounts. So if you started a respectable job or ran for public office and wanted to get rid of those embarrassing college fraternity pictures for ever, you could be out of luck.
The implications of the changes to terms and conditions were picked up by The Consumerist Web site and quickly gathered attention: that site’s post on the subject has been viewed more than half a million times.
Posting on the official company blog on Monday, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg insisted the conditions were necessary for the site to operate but promised the site “wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want.” He said the new rules were aimed more at situations where a user who’d sent a message to a friend later canceled their account, raising a legal query about whether the site then had to delete the read message from the other user’s inbox.
That didn’t satisfy many users, however. The pressure from both Facebook users and media coverage led Zuckerberg to make a new post announcing the site was reverting to the old terms and conditions for the moment. He acknowledged that “a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don’t plan to leave it there for long.”
Facebook is now asking users to give their feedback on the terms of use a new group, Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.
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