FEBRUARY 18, 2009

Facebook Folds

When I woke up this morning I headed straight to my laptop so I could log onto Mafia Wars character. (A note to Facebook users: Mafia Wars is extremely addictive and I encourage you to check it out and add me to your Mafia Wars family.)

So, I logged onto my home page and I immediately noticed a post from Facebook announcing that Facebook has changed back to its original Terms of Use. For the past few weeks, the internet has been lit ablaze by Facebook making a change to its Terms of Use using language, giving the site rights to the content you put on your profile. The language made it sound like Facebook would be allowed to maintain the rights to your uploaded photos, videos, and other materials forever even if you decided to terminate your account. What?!?

Needless to say, that didn’t make a whole lot of people happy. The anger spread from blogs and Facebook groups to television shows, like The View. The message has been the same: Facebook… we… the users… will not stand for it. You have no right to keep and use my stuff without my permission.

Shel Horowitz over at Principled Profit took a close look at the language and had this to say:

Say, what? By my reading, this not only gives Facebook the right to sell our content without even telling us, let alone cutting us in on the revenues, but also could be interpreted–it’s a stretch, but lawyers exist as an industry because of these sorts of stretches–as allowing the company the right to use any content that includes a please-link-back utility that includes Facebook.

Makes Facebook sound kind of shady, doesn’t it? Well, it seems Mark Zuckerberg and company didn’t like the negative press and caved… at least for now.  Zuckerberg wrote several blog entries this week that address his take on the situation:

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

I see his point that the language had to be included as an operational matter, but in doing so he’s touched on two important issues within social networking: privacy and intellectual property.  We love social networking sites like Facebook, because we can have our own profiles and a place to host our photos and videos. However, we also want to keep our right to privacy. We want to control who can see the information that we so proudly display. Essentially, we want to have our cake and eat it, too. Zuckerberg touches on this point in one of his posts:

People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people’s information. These two positions are at odds with each other.

It’s true, consumers want the best of both worlds, and they’ll fight for what they want.  And while the war isn’t over yet - the previous Facebook Terms of Use are in place until the company can revise them in a way that doesn’t make everyone mad - it seems as if consumers have won the battle, proving that consumer control is alive and well.