jbrotherlove

There’s plenty of chatter about Facebook’s revised Terms of Service (TOS). Reactions on Twitter and the popular post by The Consumerist vary from panic to apathy and all points inbetween.

The biggest (and legitimate) areas of concern seems to be that even if you choose to delete your account from Facebook, they still own all of your shit content. Not only have they made their TOS less protective for its users but it did so without allowing them to “opt out”.

I’m not an user of Facebook.; never have been. But I believe this is bigger than just Facebook. As a (current) leader in the social network space, their methods have the ability to inform other networks as well. And because of that, a proper reaction from social network users should be concern. As I tweeted yesterday:

you may not care about your web service’s TOS; but you should. and as a user you should ensure they treat *your* content the way you want.

Mind you, if you’re “panicking” about the changes Facebook made to their TOS, chances are you’ve never read a TOS carefully. Few of us do. Companies bank on it, actually (just like those rebates many of us never claim). Teams of lawyers are hired to include everything in a contract to completely absolve its company of any foreseeable lawsuit (no matter how rare or ridiculous it may be).

However, while panicking may be overkill, I’ve seen plenty of comments regarding the Facebook issue as “It’s no big thing”, “I don’t see the problem” and “If you care log-off the internet.” Oh really? Maybe it’s not an issue for you (which is valid). But to claim that it shouldn’t be an issue for others or that they should stop using the Internet is ridiculous.

Few are under the false impression that the web is a big, anonymous playground. But there’s a serious difference between having your hosted content crawled by Google (if you choose to allow that) and having a service claim ownership of everything you’ve done and shared, even after you’ve left said service.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has since responded to the privacy concerns. Well, sort of. He seems to boil down the TOS legalize to “just trust us”. Surely, Facebook can do better than that.

As social networks are born almost daily, we are still navigating privacy concerns. It’s during this time that users need to be clear about how they expect web spaces to treat their information. Let’s face it, if a social network lost 30% of users due to its TOS, it would be addressed. Users still have power and they should exercise it.

Privacy and ownership will continue to be a hot topic as geo-aware applications are built. Jayson hipped me to Mathew Honan’s article on Wired, in which Honan became a “geo-guinea pig”, loading “every cool and interesting location-aware program [he] could find onto [his] iPhone” and updating the world of his every move.

While Honan was able to see benefits of using the apps he also saw some of the shocking ways in which people (including himself) were leaving digital footprints in some of the least likely place; sometimes as a by product of how they talk to each other (sometimes by default). He lists one example:

[...] The first time I saw my home address on Facebook, I jumped—because I never posted it there. Then I realized it was because I had signed up for Whrrl. Like many other geosocial applications, Whrrl lets you cross-post to the microblogging platform Twitter. Twitter, in turn, gets piped to all sorts of other places. So when I updated my location in Whrrl, the message leaped first to Twitter and then to Facebook and FriendFeed before landing on my blog, where Google indexed it. By updating one small app on my iPhone, I had left a giant geotagged footprint across the Web.

I’m sure this will come up at SXSW Interactive. Who knows, by then, perhaps Facebook will have made more changes. Certainly, they don’t want another Beacon brouhaha.

Update: So yeah… Facebook reversed gears on their TOS, no doubt due to user outcry and negative press. You have power; use it.