[Infowarrior] - Facebook Retreats on Terms of Service

[Richard Forno]

Facebook Retreats on Terms of Service

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2009/02/facebook_retreats_on_terms_of.html#more

After a long weekend of increasingly bitter reaction to recent  
revisions of its "terms of service," Facebook hit the Undo button on  
the changes late last night. It reinstated the previous terms and said  
it would take some time to hear its users.

Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly e-mailed a little after 11  
last night, writing that "we're rolling back to the previous terms of  
use for now and listening to some more input from our userbase and  
outside groups."

(Disclaimer: As you can see from my own Facebook page, I've known  
Chris since college, where we worked on the same school paper.)

The offending item in Facebook's Feb. 4 revision to its terms of  
service--"TOS" for short--was a long paragraph that made some sweeping  
claims to the words, pictures and other media uploaded by Facebook  
users:

     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.

The older, now reinstated terms of service made many of the same  
claims but also included these sentences:

     You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If  
you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will  
automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may  
retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert  
any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you,  
subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full  
ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property  
rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

As Facebook users soon realized, the new TOS said nothing about what  
would happen to their data if they canceled their accounts. The  
Consumerist blog summarized the changes as "We Can Do Anything We Want  
With Your Content. Forever."

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg semi-apologized for the new phrasing  
in a blog post, calling them "overly formal" while insisting that "In  
reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want."

Users were not convinced, posting rebuttals on their own blogs--and,  
of course, in a Facebook group organized to oppose the changes.

The company's management seems to have decided this was an argument it  
could not win. Smart move, but we'll have to see what it does next.  
Will the next TOS revision be written only for lawyers, or for the  
Facebook user base at large?

As I asked in an e-mail to Chris Kelly yesterday: "When these terms  
were drafted, were they not assessed with an eye towards how they'd  
look to the general public?"

I'm sympathetic to the people who have to write these documents.  
Writing something that will stand up in court, even against the  
loopiest litigation, is not easy, and it's not always possible to do  
so in language that looks right to laypeople. (For several years, my  
job here involved asking outside writers to agree to the moderately  
tangled legalese in the Post's standard freelance agreement before I  
could assign them any stories.)

But the costs of bad publicity can be a lot higher than the hourly  
rates for whatever legal help is needed to slap down a frivolous  
lawsuit--which could happen regardless of how airtight a site's  
contracts might be.

An hour or so after the rollback of the terms of service, Zuckerberg  
posted a new item on Facebook's blog. He pledged that the next  
revision of the terms would, in fact, be written for people without  
J.D. degrees, and with the help of individual Facebook users:

     Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are  
now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how  
people share and control their information, and it will be written  
clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the  
governing document that we'll all live by, Facebook users will have a  
lot of input in crafting these terms.

The post closed with an invitation to join a new group, "Facebook Bill  
of Rights and Responsibilities," to discuss these changes.

If all 175 million-plus Facebook users join in, it may take a while to  
see some sort of consensus emerge from that conversation. But one  
unambiguous upside does seem clear in all this: People won't take  
"trust me" for an answer and are actually reading these documents,  
then trying to hold the corporations behind them accountable.