Just the other day, I posted about how you can’t really trust that any of your stuff online will be private. As a general rule of thumb, suppose that anything you put online will be seen by someone you don’t know (or worse, someone you DO know!). Now comes word that Facebook has changed their Terms of Service (article here or here)so that they can keep your content and use it for whatever purposes they want (including selling it) even if you close your account.

From their Terms of Service

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.

And this little gem

The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.

So this means that our content will stay around on Facebook even if we decide to cancel our account. I don’t actually think that anything really bad will come of this. In fact, this is probably already the norm, they just put it into a legally bonding contract now. But the possibilities of what COULD happen here are really broad. Even if I say to Facebook I want out, that can’t happen. They own all the material I put on the website. And furthermore (and this has always been the case), this isn’t about just the material I add. There are a bunch of pictures of me on Facebook, none of them added by me. Other people added pictures of me. Granting rights like this to Facebook for MY property just seems a bit excessive.

Will anything happen?
No, I don’t really think anything will happen. I honestly don’t think people really care all that much. If we honestly cared, we wouldn’t be throwing all our crap on these web services anyways. We want someone to do all the aggregation and prettifying for us, so we will let Facebook do whatever they want. I don’t see Facebook taking advantage of this, I think they were just trying to protect themselves from potential lawsuits. Amanda French did a review of the various TOS for web services. It seems as though Facebook has taken this to a new level with their changes. It’ll be interesting to see if other services follow suit.

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