Facebook’s vision for a new terms of service

wow it’s been an amazing week so far with Facebook eventually managing their exposure quite well I light of the media explosion 😉
First there was the initial shock and disbelief at what they had done, even though it is written in the terms of service that they have the right to change these without users’ consent, they made a subtle change that was a direct flout of their users’ privacy. In fact the terms of service were pretty bad already without this change.

The changes were actually made in early February but not widely noticed until Sunday, when The Consumerist’s Chris Walters stumbled upon the subtly shifted language. The section in question explains how Facebook has an “irrevocable, perpetual” license to use your “name, likeness, and image” in essentially any way, including within promotions or external advertising. These changes made by Facebook would effectively give then eternal ownership of your personal content–even if you decide to delete your account. At the moment they only have this right so long as your account is active. Read more …

Finally Mark Zuckerberg made a blog posting yesterday stating that Facebook had reverted to their original terms of service and are working on creating a new terms of service. I really like his approach, on his blog he wrote that “More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren’t just a document that protect our rights; it’s the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world. Given its importance, we need to make sure the terms reflect the principles and values of the people using the service.”

And we can be involved in building this new terms of service, check out http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=69048030774.

Smartly managed Mark!

2 Replies to “Facebook’s vision for a new terms of service”

  1. clearly they screwed up BIG time, but I feel that Mark responded in a way that demonstrated that he understood what was important for Facebook users. Also I guess they realised that they can in fact differentiate themselves by demonstrating that they care about their users’ privacy in a big way, and can now turn this mess around into an opportunity if they are smart about how they do this.

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