Facebook Terns of Service

[ Facebook backs down ]
February 18, 2009 By Associated Press
In an about-face following a torrent of online protests, Facebook is backing off a change in its user policies while it figures how best to resolve questions like who controls the information shared on the social networking site.
The site, which boasts 175 million users around the world, quietly updated its terms of use—its governing document—a couple of weeks ago. The changes sparked an uproar after popular consumer rights advocacy blog Consumerist.com pointed them out Sunday, in a post titled “Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: ‘We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.’”
Facebook has since sought to reassure its users this is not the case. And on Wednesday morning, users who logged on to Facebook were greeted by a message saying the site is reverting to its previous terms of use policies while it resolves the issues raised.
Facebook spelled out, in plain English rather than the legalese that prompted the protests, that it “doesn’t claim rights to any of your photos or other content. We need a license in order to help you share information with your friends, but we don’t claim to own your information.”
Tens of thousands of users joined protest groups on Facebook, saying the new terms grant the site the ability to control their information forever, even after they cancel their accounts.
This prompted a clarification from Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, who told users in a blog post Monday that “on Facebook, people own their information and control who they share it with.”
Zuckerberg also acknowledged that a “lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective of the rights we need to provide this service to you.”
But this wasn’t enough to quell user protests, prompting the site to also create a group called “Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities,” designed to let users give input on Facebook’s terms of use. It also apologized for what it called “the confusion around these issues.”
“We never intended to claim ownership over people’s content even though that’s what it seems like to many people,” read a post from Facebook on the bill of rights page.
Originally published in Marketing Magazine, February 2009