Remember that time that The Internet threw a fit about their information being made available to advertisers on Facebook? Or that time that The Internet threw a fit about Google Chrome’s End User License Agreement?
I mean, both of these were more than a month ago, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t.
Anyways, it’s happening again. The seemingly omnipresent, over-curious and under-informed Joe Blogger has taken drastic offense to the legalese in the newly revised Terms of Use, which seem to say that The Facebook has unlimited rights to use, publish, or turn into a five-part musical anything you post on their site.
Mark Zuckerberg responded on his Facebook blog with all sorts of nice things about respect and information, essentially the stork in the cabbage patch story to the textbook density of their legal copy:
Our philosophy that people own their information and control who they share it with has remained constant. A lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective of the rights we need to provide this service to you. Over time we will continue to clarify our positions and make the terms simpler.
If, after reading this, you’re still tearing your hair out worried that you’ll have to pay royalties next time you quote yourself saying “omg, lol, like totally 4 shur,” I’d like to ask you a serious question: have you ever met a fucking corporate lawyer?
In my prior work life, I had many a long and delightful discussion about contract law with a soul-sucking, flesh-eating, disgustingly well-informed and over-technical piranha of a corporate lawyer to whom I’ll refer as “Schadenfreude Esq.” The man had precisely no interest in invoking any of these clauses unless it came to litigation. He’s a corporate lawyer for fuck’s sake. He knows fine-print self-preservation like Bobby Fischer knows endgames. He’s paid an exorbitant salary and bills a jaw-dropping per diem to ensure two things: that a company cannot be gruesomely fucked in the ass over a contract dispute, and that a company can gruesomely fuck someone in the ass over a contract dispute.
If you don’t get it, shut the fuck up. That’s why you’re unemployed. Have another bowl of Cap’n Crunch get back to your JO&C time.
My point here is threefold:
- The facebook is covering its corporate ass. The contract reads like a contract. Look over the terms of use for every piece of software you’ve ever used, spend a long evening with a snifter of brandy, a magnifying glass, and your credit card agreements, and then get back to me.
- Jesus fucking Christ, like you were going to write Finnegans Wake on someone’s wall or some shit? If all those tear-stained letters to Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux couldn’t get you published, I doubt Mark Zuckerberg’s going to suddenly make a cool mil off your self-indulgent status updates.
- THERE IS NO FACEBOOK CONSPIRACY. Really, this is getting out of hand. You voluntarily signed up to post the intimate details of your relationships and broadcast photos of yourself butt naked and vomiting into a policeman’s hat. The Facebook is a website that allows you to do so, and to continue to do so for free, and you clearly don’t understand how they are able to do so and stay in business. Let the man work.
Great article. I administrate a “Facebook-conspiracy” blog, and this was definitely the hot topic yesterday. You really cut to the core; nice work!
I don’t think they’re called “The Facebook” anymore…dropped the “the” a while back, no? Could be wrong…
Maybe not Finnegan’s Wake, but what about photography?
Matty uses “the facebook” the way Coca-Cola uses the term “classic”: to evoke a time before the brand was diluted. It harkens back to a simpler era wherein you could post pictures of yourself vomiting the excesses of some greek party without the fear of your employer seeing it. I also think it was a time when there was just more nipple going around. I think we’re all a bit nostalgic.
Haha, right on! I work for a website, and while I wouldn’t make those derogatory statements about our lawyers, who are OK with me, everything else here is the absolute truth.
“Be nice” and “keep it clean” say the rules above. Indeed. “Crass” being an operative word here, I’m assuming that your belligerent tone is par for the course despite those admonitions. And so:
No there isn’t a Facebook conspiracy–unless you count the fact that Facebook is counting on millions of morons to not care a whit about privacy rights. And of course they won’t, so you needn’t worry Matty; most people won’t bother to think this issue through even as far as you have. You’re actually screaming at the infinitesimally small number of schmucks who have BOTH an extant Facebook profile AND a sufficient quantity of firing neurons to figure out that Facebook’s intentions might not be as innocent as Zuckerberg insists they are every time he gets caught shaving off a few more privacy safeguards. Or, in the case of Beacon, agreeing to the wholesale…well, sale, of records of users’ online activities on websites with no apparent links to Facebook–and without any clear notice, needless to say.
Of course, those of us who refuse to further line Zuckerberg’s pockets by willingly entering his whorehouse of personal information have little stake in the war you’re waging. Hoist a hundred Facebook flags over your house to show your allegiance if you like. But don’t scold other people for caring about their privacy rights. Sure, they’re using a free (gratis, certainly not libre) service of their own free will. But they are also making a lot of people very wealthy by doing so. Those few Facebook users who are smart enough to question how their personal information is being monetized by Facebook have every right to do so, and by their actions they are helping to protect tens of millions of unquestioning sheep who assume that corporate boards, venture capitalists, and stock holders will always do what’s best for them.
So sorry to disappoint you by offering an opposing viewpoint, but after being told to “shut the fuck up” I really couldn’t help myself. And now, back to my job–because, surprise, I actually have one.
@Brian– I actually made a conscious effort in writing this to drop the article, but it was “the Facebook” when I joined it, and I can’t quite shake the association.
@dv– I don’t consider anything I said about lawyers to be derogatory so long as they’re on my side.
@Dave– “Be nice” and “keep it clean” are relative terms — read through some comments on YouTube and you’ll get my counterpoint. We’re here to foster intelligent discussions, so I’m anything but disappointed to find you have something to say — and since you clearly “get it,” o gainfully-employed shepherd, my instructions to shut the fuck up were rightly ignored.
Firstly, Facebook, as a service designed to allow users to share themselves, is not precisely in the business of keeping secrets. If you want to write all your personal information down someplace where no one will ever see it, buy a notebook and a safe. As far as not redistributing personal details, allowing users to control access to their profiles, and maintaining secure data facilities, I’d say they’re an industry leader. Sure, there’s the fairy guy who lied to his boss and Michael Phelps taking bong rips, but Facebook’s privacy standards haven’t been in question in any of these incidents.
Secondly, everyone who has your information monetizes it. It’s the nature of the beast. Credit bureaus can and will sell massive quantities of your information to advertisers. Most registration- or subscription-based websites can and will make at least demographics, if not name, address, and email, available to people who wish to “cross-market” to you. Your information is a commodity in the world of marketing whether you know about it or not, and the fact that Facebook is being reasonably transparent about how they treat your information puts them ahead of the curve, here, too.
Finally, users who are concerned about the privacy and propriety of their content shouldn’t be using Facebook as a primary means of publication. There are plenty of cheap to free methods of publishing online that allow you to slap your very own little (c) 2009 at the bottom of anything you write. And yes, I realize that I’m addressing a small minority of Facebook users here: those who are concerned about the privacy and propriety of their content. The vast majority of Facebook users haven’t posted anything on their accounts worth stealing, and thusly shouldn’t be worried about its theft.
You have every right to question how Facebook is using your information online, but you also have an obligation to understand it if you’re going to start complaining. You also need to come to terms with the fact that they’re not a nonprofit, they’re not foundation-funded, and what they’re doing costs money. They need to monetize you somehow, or they’d have to start charging you a subscription fee. If you don’t like it, you have my permission to pull a Jakob Lodwick and leave the internet.
Baa, motherfucker. I’m looking forward to your friend request.
Just FYI, 1)… It’s its.
Ed: Fixed. Thanks!
[...] new Facebook terms are not that big of a deal, so chill the eff out, [...]
While it’s kind of you to imply that you’d accept a friend request should I proffer one, I’m afraid I really don’t have a Facebook account. Well, to be more accurate, I no longer have an ACTIVE Facebook account.
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.
The Facebook went to shit as soon as it stopped being college-only and started trying to compete with MySpace for how much bullshit someone could pile up on a single page.
It’s Finnegans Wake, not Finnegan’s Wake. Just sayin.
Ed: Fixed, and duly noted. Wasn’t exactly a work known for proper punctuation, I suppose.
Can yall please leave the comments in “25 Random Things” form. Thanks — The Management.
The problem with the response from Facebook is that a “philosophy” isn’t worth much when compared to the word of the agreement. That’s tantamount to a verbal addendum to a written contract, which by the way states that it is the ‘entire” agreement. In other words, it doesn’t matter what they say, because what they do is the thing that matters. This is part of a continuing lesson for those still misled to believe that corporations have anyone’s interest at heart but their own.
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.
Well I’ll be damned: someone wrote something reasonable on the internet. Mr. Bell, despite my raging ego’s best efforts to uncover a chink in your armor or summon indignation at your commentary, I find that to be an entirely plausible, and furthermore commendable, refutation of my thesis.
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
Sadly, most people would not have looked closely enough to notice the change in Facebook’s Terms of Service… looks them social networkers are doing a good job of looking out for each other
[...] I wrote, about Facebook’s initial response, in the comments to WHAT’S GOOD FOR FACEBOOK IS GOOD FOR AMERICA: The problem with the response from Facebook is that a “philosophy” isn’t worth much when [...]