Facebook’s new Terms of Service

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There is a lot of rage about the new TOS from Facebook. In short, it gives all the rights (and I mean all of them) of what you share in Facebook (and what is connected to it it seems) to Facebook. With the new terms, this is even true if you delete things or your account. Mark now posted on the Facebook blog with a few words about the TOS but I am not really happy. He says that “In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want.” and that is just plain wonderful. But please, reflect that in the TOS and get your lawyers in line.

I can see how the TOS came about. The lawyers asked several people what they want to do with the content and started writing. Then they asked whether they might ever use it for advertising, and people said that sure, there might be something they could do there. Would they use it after the account was deleted, sure, for mining the data would be nice and my friends still have my mails via Facebook. And in all those things go.

Duncan from The Inquisitor actually has a great post about all of this. The good thing is that he copied over the TOS from Google’s Picasa and who would have thought, the Google Lawyers managed to write something up that makes sure I remain holder of the copyright and I remain in control. And I am pretty sure that Google would be able to do anything with my content if they really wanted to, unless I delete it.

Come on Mark, you can do better than Google. Sure it makes the TOS more complicated and sure, you need to add some limits to your system, but this is what the users want.

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