Big Brother is Facebook (?)

19Feb09

Recently there has been an uproar in the social networking community about claims Facebook made in their new Terms of Use policy about their ownership of the information the users post on the site, even after users cancel accounts.

The offending language claimed:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.

Users went into a tizzy, they post private, personal information on Facebook and were worried if that information didn’t belong to them, especially after they have closed down their account,  it could be sold to other businesses or used in ways they did not approve of. The quick and easy answer to this, cynics might claim, is not posting personal information on websites in the first place. But in the world of Web 2.0 Facebook is used for much more than resenting your old college roommate’s new life, and light stalking of that popular girl from high school . It is a way to advertise your band or your business. It is a way to network professionally. I am a fan of banned books week, a member of ALA on facebook, and I made all my friends become fans of this blog (erm, asked them nicely). Facebook is a community the users feel that they built up for themselves, and the company claiming ownership of that community hurt users on many levels.

The scandal seems to mirror the OCLC claim of ownership on its records in a lot of ways. In both cases, users of a community had contributed information that they thought was for use by that community, not for profit by the company who owned the community. Free Range Librarian has a very good post breaking down the reasons why OCLC’s claim struck so hard withint the librarian community.

I think what we are seeing now is the virtual world at a crossroads. These communities of information were created without any understanding by the people who joined them, or perhaps even the groups of people that made them, what their long term purpose really was. Perhaps we are finding out now that that purpose was more nefarious than we had first suspected, or perhaps now the boards of these communities are simply seeing an opportunity. Either way, what we are experiencing are growing pains: the shock of transition.

Unlike OCLC, Facebook saw the reaction to Terms of Use and changed course. They are in the process of collecting use input in order to put together a ‘Bill of Rights‘ for community users. Perhaps it is just a better way of selling their goals to their public, or perhaps it is a real attempt to create a situation where users are comfortable with the way their information is used. There are certainly many ways to look at this issue, and it will be interesting to follow how it unfolds.

Filed under: By: Miss Information, Copyright, News, change or die, pop culture, tools of the trade   |  1 Comment