4 Reasons Why You Should Not Freak Out About the Facebook Terms of Service Changes

by Greg Bussmann on February 16, 2009

Wow, a lot of people are all hot and bothered about this Facebook issue.  If you have not been paying attention, Facebook recently changed their Terms of Service to say, in a nutshell, that they own whatever content you put up on their servers now and forever, even if you cancel your account.

Calm down people, this was a PR blunder for Facebook, but at the end of the day, I don’t think you have all that much to worry about, and I will tell you why.  And after I do, you can use the comments to call me naive, a neopyhte, or whatever else you want, but I think you will agree with me at least in part, that:

  1. Your content, while special to you, is not that special. 
  2. If you aren’t selling your content, what makes you think anyone will buy it from Facebook either?
  3. If you are selling your content, why are you also uploading it to Facebook?
  4. Facebook, and by Facebook I mean it’s owners, have a gigantic payday in their future, do you really think that they want to kill their brand by becoming known as content thieves?  

Facebook is taking the heat at the moment, but have you ever thought about who owns all the data you have been pumping onto servers all over the internet?  Have you read any of the countless Terms of Service agreements you have agreed to? No, I am guessing most of you never thought about any of this until now.  Now all of a sudden, you are starting to wonder, who owns your Google Docs, your Youtube videos, your Tweets, even your email and maybe your blog, for pete’s sake?  I don’t really know for sure who owns it all either, but I am guessing you are not the only one who would make a claim to your data. 

What I am saying, whether you agree or not, is that whoever owns it, this is your data.  It’s meaningful to you, but it’s just digital stuff, and really, other than it’s primary purpose of being a means to bring you back to their infrastructure, to see their ads and use their product, your data does not hold much value for the providers like Facebook.  If that approach makes you uncomfortable, don’t put your data on a server you don’t own.

Go see Chris Brogan for a very good take on all this as well.

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  • the fact that Facebook change their TOS back so quickly is an indication that they knew they were doing something wrong, or at least "a little off"
  • You could make that case, and I would have a hard time arguing it...however, I think this was a PR disaster from the get go, and changing the TOS back could just have been the fastest way to make the torrent of negative publicity go away.

    Thanks for the comment.
  • Gracias.
  • Hootie
    I think the point was that Facebook retains all rights to your posts from now until forever, not that any profit was being made. Imagine in a few short years when people with Facebook profiles begin to run for high-level office and their old content is owned--and distributed to media outlets--by Facebook. Or celebrities in the future. Easy pickings.

    I see it more as an infringement on privacy, although the argument can be made that it is the user who is willingly uploading the content. There should be some degree of respect of privacy on Facebook's side, as is with Craigslist.
  • You can argue Facebook's policies all day...they can ultimately do what they want. The point I think people need to take away from this is that you have to be responsible and take ownership of what you put online, be it good or bad content.

    Bottom line, thanks for taking the time to come by and read my take.
  • Nice 4 points there. I agree, once you put something online - it's not a secret. People seem to always forget that fact.

    Rex
  • Maybe so, except that it establishes a precedence of infringement, if any user ever found themselves in a situation that required copyright enforcement with their property on Facebook. That precedence could be used against them if they were to ever try to legally protect those works in the future. Granted, this isn't as pertinent an issue to a layman user as it is say, a professional photographer, etc. but intellectual property can be a "have them and not need them rather than need them and not have them" situation.
  • Dana,

    Thanks for the comment. You do raise an interesting point. The bottom line to me is that I think overall people, myself included, have to become more aware of what we are signing up for, and thus able to make an educated choice as to whether , if you are a professional photographer lets say, a particular site, in this case Facebook, is the place you should be uploading your copyrighted material to. Maybe it's not. And if you are uploading, maybe your property should be watermarked or of lesser quality than the original so the owner is less worried about how they may use it.

    And if you know the terms, and you can not tolerate the concessions you would have to make from a copyright standpoint, then you don't upload.

    Intellectual property is tougher, but I would think (again, perhaps naively, that a trademark would trump a Term of Service agreement in court, especially in Facebook was actively trying to license your property.

    I still think this move is in the other direction, providing cover for Facebook.

    Here's a link to another well thought-out post that goes a little further into the legal aspect of it all: http://www.usabilitycounts.com/2009/02/16/the-f...
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