Facebook Changes TOS – Cause For Alarm?

You’ve maybe heard of Facebook.  It has 175 million active users and is experiencing a huge boom in users 30 and older.  But the social networking juggernaut just changed its Terms of Service (TOS) ever-so-slightly, claiming ownership of any content put up on the site, and will continue to do so even if an account is deleted.

Which sounds terrifying.  I think we’re conditioned to imagine the web as a free space, but as anyone operating their own website or e-commerce store knows, that’s far from the truth.  You pay for storage. You pay for bandwidth.  You have access to a ton of data about the foot traffic that comes into your site – what they look at, where they click, where they’re from, what browser they’re using, etc. The cloud is not free, nor is it ever truly anonymous.  If you’re still living in those halcyon “I-can-steal-all-the-music-I-want-without-anybody-ever-knowing” days, this probably comes as shock to you.

Just like your store, Facebook is, at its heart, a business.  It provides value to you and me by letting us network with friends and old classmates and play Scrabulous (or whatever they call it these days), but Facebook’s real business is shaping up to be data portability, thanks to Facebook Connect.  Social media pundit Chris Brogan is following this line of thinking, too, noting that “if Facebook Connect and other services are going to make your data ubiquitous and shared and spread all around like peanut butter, then they have to have the rights to republish and distribute it.”

Simply put, if Facebook is hosting your drunken photographs (and you know you have them. Heck, I have them, though I swear it wasn’t me that posted them) and vlogs about Chris Brown, and it’s going to be responsible for distributing these things online in places that aren’t necessarily Facebook.com, it needs to own that material.

I’ve been known to caution that, like an elephant, Google never forgets, but that doesn’t mean that the Internet community does.  There was a similar freak-out not too long ago about the TOS of Google Docs.  As someone who does a lot of his writing in Google Docs and stores drafts of documents in the cloud, I paid attention to that, but ultimately it turned out to be some verbiage ensuring that Google has the appropriate rights and licenses to share cloud-hosted content with others at the user’s discretion.

Long story short, this is not something that we should be overreacting to.  If you are uncomfortable with the level of access that you may have just discovered that you’ve already been giving the Web, that’s a different story.