You are the better man, and you have my compliments. Should you find yourself in New York City, I believe I owe you a drink, and I’d gladly continue this discourse. matty [at] publicschoolintelligentsia [dot] com

They must be pushed back from over reaching or they will.

I have too much respect for the function of the law to dismiss the blatant overreaching of a terms of use that claims permanent permission. Even if it’s that the corporate lawyers were being lazy using boilerplate, and the people in charge were being lazy by not double checking the lawyers’ homework, they did put it in writing.

Take a look at the terms of use at Flickr or Twitter or Virb for examples of how things can be done. The kind of wording that Facebook used isn’t excusable.

And, moreover, until corporate lawyers and their corporate masters get a clue that they are not buying and selling people but rather offering a service to people that can chose to leave with their work and value intact, they deserve to have people freak out at them when they do something stupid.

Ed: Fixed, and duly noted. Wasn’t exactly a work known for proper punctuation, I suppose.

You see, after much cajoling from friends, I created an account in 2007. Three months later, amidst the controversy and lawsuits over Facebook’s Beacon advertising system, I shuttered the account for good. I say “shuttered” and not “closed” because, of course, actually CLOSING a Facebook account is far from easy. To actually remove your information from Facebook’s servers, you first have to manually delete each and every single item that ever publicly existed on the account–every friend, every post, every bit of scribbling on your “wall”, every zombie bite and mini-feed post, every single thing–manually. THEN you have to find the proper contact information, email the company, and ask for the account to be deleted–because your Facebook account potentially contains far more information than that which is made available to its members (see below). THEN, of course, you have trust that they will actually delete the remainder your information despite the difficulties they insure that you will have in initiating the process.

Since I never posted anything of consequence to Facebook, and made no Internet purchases during the period that Beacon was activated but unannounced, I have not bothered with an attempt to permanently delete my account. I don’t mean this to imply any trust of Facebook; it’s really just laziness on my part. There are a good many reasons to thoroughly distrust Facebook.

The truth is that for a period of at least several weeks, Facebook collected not only the data that users knowingly added to their accounts on Facebook’s on site, but also a wide array of information about business conducted at many other _entirely separate_ sites–including the exact types and prices and quantities of items purchased, information accessed, etc.–without ANY acknowledgment that they were doing so. Even AFTER the true nature of the Beacon program was discovered (please, do note that it had to be discovered, as Facebook did not willingly disclose it) and publicized and Facebook announced that they would allow users to opt out of the program, independent security researchers found that this data was still being collected and sent to Facebook regardless of whether the individual had opted out of the program or not.

This (weeks-long) episode alone should be more than enough to make a rational person question the honesty of any statements made by Facebook regarding the privacy of personal information. But there is also the fact that Facebook does not willingly delete the personal information in “closed” accounts. The recent change in their ToS statement might be entirely innocent, but given their past behavior, it doesn’t seem very smart to trust Facebook’s assurances that they have no malicious intent.

It’s one thing to use Facebook with the understanding that whatever you post there is forever their property to do with as they please. It’s entirely another to understand the fact that Facebook has a very real history of collecting personal data its users ENTERED AT OTHER WEBSITES–data that no user would ever reasonably expect Facebook to collect, since no one was given the opportunity to opt out–and not just aggregating it to create anonymous mass statistics, but actually linking it to personal accounts and storing the data so that it has extensive records of its users’ activities on sites that have no obvious relationship to Facebook. And now, thanks to the new ToS, that data may or may not belong to Facebook forever.

I’m well aware that my information is monetized everyday by a variety of companies, some online and some not. I won’t be leaving the Internet anytime soon over something that should be obvious to anyone familiar with capitalism. Still, I think Facebook (and other websites) should be held to reasonable standards for responsible handling of personal information, clear disclosure of what they’re collecting and how they collect it, and what they intend to do with it. In the past, Facebook has been guilty of concealing relevant information about the information they collect–including lying about collecting it in the first place. If you think that they deserve your trust I won’t argue with you–but I still think it’s irresponsible of you to insist that Facebook’s profit-driven ends justify any means it chooses to employ.

Ed: Fixed. Thanks!