After reeling from the backlash of a public outrage surrounding a few nondescript lines in a revised terms of service agreement, the nation’s social networking site of record has revoked clauses that transfer ownership to Facebook of anything posted to — or deleted from — its users’ profile pages.
The message appeared on users’ homepages Wednesday, citing that the site will revert to its previous ToS agreement until it resolves “the issues people have raised” about clauses added about two weeks ago. These clauses stated that Facebook, in addition to having ownership of all information currently uploaded onto the site, also had the rights to all original property that users had linked, uploaded or wrote — ever.
Even if users delete their accounts, or remove links posted via Facebook widgets, the site claimed it had the right to that property.
When news of the clauses broke, more than a hundred thousand Facebook users joined groups against the revised ToS and many users began deleting their accounts in protest.
John Martin, a technical writer for the Office of Information Technology, said he considered deleting his account but decided to first see how the site handled such a large volume of negative reactions.
“It made me nervous,” said Martin, who began deleting in vain all February feeds from his Livejournal account to his Facebook Notes. “I’ve been pulling the feed into Facebook for about a year. I was concerned that they were saying if they had copyright or ownership. It didn’t seem right.”
Martin said he tried to find a way to delete all the daily feeds, but resorted to deleting them one at a time.
“I started to do that got all the way back to the beginning of February and it just started to be too time consuming, so I stopped,” he said. “I decided to see how this was going to play out and not put anything else in there.”
Although Martin began to feed his blog into his profile page once Facebook repealed the new ToS as if the site’s rules would stay less invasive, he said he hopes Facebook’s attempt at defining Internet copyright laws will spur a legislative movement on a subject that has “been fuzzy for quite some time.”
“I haven’t heard this type of thing happening with any other social networking sites and I think it was such a big deal because so many people are on there. It’s an alarmist headline. It makes you think about ownership and copyright issues on the Internet,” he said. “It feels like someone’s stealing from you.”
Certainly, he said, other social networks will hesitate before they write similar clauses — at least until Congress passes some law that differentiates an individual user’s right to information from the site onto which that information was uploaded.
But Stan North Martin, director of OIT’s Outreach, Communications and Consulting, is not waiting for such a law to tell students what’s safe — or, more importantly, what’s not safe — to put on the Internet.
“People are posting pictures that they may regret later,” he said. “Anything that is posted to the Internet, it’s no longer yours. It’s being indexed, it’s being catalogued.”
The Wayback Machine is an internet archive that intends to create snapshots of the Internet as it was during a particular moment in time. Even if the original poster deletes an item from a Web site, that item has likely been indexed into a Web history site or has been copied onto another site by another user, North Martin said.
“One of the trends in high school is to take pictures of themselves in the nude and send them to their boyfriends. The boy starts sharing them with all his buddies, and pretty soon it’s posted everywhere,” North Martin said in reference to an incident that happened in University Towers about 10 years ago.
“There was a couple in UT, and let’s just say that they shot some videos,” North Martin said. “One of those videos showed up in a public place, and the next time the woman in the video walked in the room, everybody in the dining hall stands up and gives her a standing ovation.”
He said he has always been cautious about what he allows both himself and his elder daughter to put on Facebook, but after the then-new and now-former ToS clauses, he said he is even more cautious about what he puts on the Internet.
“Facebook with this change makes me think twice about what I post on my account,” North Martin said. “This policy makes me think a third time,” North Martin said. “If this is going to be out there forever and ever, I have to ask myself if it is something I want out there.”
