Nikolas Woischnik

A couple of days ago facebook had changed its Terms of Service (TOS) without prior notice and whaaaaat a change it was. The Facebook TOS have always been a proclamation of “We own your Social Graph” or how my friend Daniel puts it “We own your arse”.

Here my favorite excerpt: “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.”

Breathe. It sounds harsh I know, but at least one always had the option to remove the content and/or cancel one’s account, in which case facebook would have lost its rights to do WHATEVER they want with your fotos, contact information, application data, etc. This was due to an important paragraph in its TOS: “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.”

But then sneaky facebook decided to take that right from you, without even telling you about it. They simply deleted this section from its TOS. Sneaky play behind your back!!! Was that legal? Well, another part of its TOS gives them the right to do just that: “We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or delete portions of these Terms of Use at any time without further notice. If we do this, we will post the changes to these Terms of Use on this page and will indicate at the top of this page the date these terms were last revised. Your continued use of the Service or the Site after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms of Use.”

I kid you not! They can basically change the TOS as they please without telling you about it and with your continuation in using fb you automatically accept the changes. As my friend Beni puts, having people agree to something that they have no influence over and that can change against your favor at all times is just like having people agree to the weather. So what should we do? Check the TOS every day? Every hour? And wouldn’t it already be too late once we see that the TOS have been changed to something like “We will now sell posters of those great pictures you took in Hampi.”

Most people of course don’t even care or think about TOSs. I am still striked how many of my friends have their postal address or mobile telephone number on facebook. God bless’em. Me, I was pissed off like crazy when I heard about the changes in TOS and for the last two days posted the following status updates:

I yesterday discussed with Beni that one should form a group on facebook about it to aggregate the protest. As it turns out that was not needed. Facebook probably received thousands of emails and scanned status updates by keywords, just like one can do on Twitter to monitor a brand’s recognition. When opening my facebook account today, I was greeted by the following:

Round one goes to the user, but go on facebook, challenge us again!