6 ms·

Facebook: "We can do anything we want with your content. Forever"

83 points by manvsmachine 18y ago

CalmQuiet 18y ago
Well, it's a natural power grab. If you can grab it, why not: who knows what financial benefits may appear later. Some day a 21st Century "Diary of Ann Frank" might start with notes made on FB. Won't FB want to take advantage of print/advert/movie rights. $$$ "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
- jacquesm 18y ago
  they may want it and they may claim they've got it but I highly doubt it would fly. The manufacturer of the paper you write on does not get to claim copyright, you do.
  - zzkt 18y ago
    Did you actually read the terms of service?
    - unalone 18y ago
      Yeah. They're very "You're not allowed to get mad at us if your stuff stays on the database after you're gone, because it's really hard for us to make sure it all disappears." If you're paranoid/have never used a site with TOS, that sounds like "We want to steal your creative ideas," but I assure you that if Facebook ever did something like that, they would get pounded hard and lose users. HN had this exact discussion with the Gmail TOS, I believe, and people were worried that Google would be stealing their emailed poetry. Sites really aren't evil. You've got to trust me on this, most sites aren't saying "How can we potentially steal a million dollars in the off-chance that one of our users posts up a movie script as a note rather than, say, sending it off to an executive?" Rather, they're saying, "Look, we're getting a lot of people who're being dicks about how we keep their data so that if they want to return their account magically comes back, and we think that it's better to keep that data than to remove it, because that way the people who delete accounts stupidly can come back and be happy they don't have to start again. At the same time, it's true that we're retaining data we shouldn't retain. So let's just add to our TOS that we're allowed to do that, since most people won't care, and since it means we can provide a useful service that'll help more people than it will piss off."
      - indigoviolet 18y ago
        Thank you, one person with sense amidst all this stupid trigger happy paranoia.
pierrefar 18y ago
Well that $15b valuation has to come from somewhere. What this says is they want to be a media company with millions of producers.
- gaius 18y ago
  Facebook wants not to be sued if someone's boss sees something they shouldn't and fires that someone. That's the real reason for this policy. By uploading content to FB you absolve them of responsibility for whom they show it to. Seriously, you think a million bad cameraphone pictures of people getting drunk are worth $15Bn?
  - pierrefar 18y ago
    I never said that, or more accurately, the sarcasm about them being a media company didn't come through in my sentence. There is also the element of trust. What you describe is a sensible thing to protect against, but I have that gut feeling that the new policy is covering a new approach FB may take. Something feels wrong with having this wording of this policy, so I mistrust the intentions behind this new policy until evidence to the contrary emerges. I'm not holding my breath.
  - c00p3r 18y ago
    The idea of make and sell trend and analytical reports is on the surface. At least they and google did it for 'internal' use.
- thepanister 18y ago
  Well... Facebook is not worth the $15b... but I think it was made just for propaganda purposes.. They wanted the press to keep a spot on Facebook!
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
Rod 18y ago
Would it be too far-fetched to claim that Facebook's evil terms of use create an opportunity for a new photo-sharing platform? Facebook makes it very easy to share photos. What if one could still share photos with friends on Facebook, but these photos were not uploaded to Facebook's server?
- mseebach 18y ago
  A quick google reveals serveral Flickr for Facebooks apps.. but I think a major value-driver for photos on FB is tagging of friends, and the "see all photos of..", "see photos of NN and me" features, and I think those are difficult/impossible to tap into without using FB's own photo app (although I don't know). An idea could be to make an app that will upload deliberately crippled (low resolution, watermark), yet recognizable, pictures to FB, and a high-quality copy on Flickr, so tags work, but when you go the to picture, there's a note "I won't let FB own my stuff, see a high quality version of this pic on (Flickr-link) that I own. Posted by CoolPhotoApp."..
  - unalone 18y ago
    If I was on Facebook and a friend of mine started doing that, I would unfriend him for being a dick. If he tagged me in a low-res picture, so that all my friends looking for my photos would see a blurry me in the mix, I'd be pretty pissed off. Or worse: I'd ban the application, as is my prerogative, and suddenly I don't see any of these photos at all and that app destroys photos entirely.
plesn 18y ago
A non-evil social network would have to be distributed and based on open protocols: you could be @facebook.com but could interact with people on other networks so that users would have choice. They could even have their own server. The net and the web were built like that, but now why are we building "jails" within the compelling interactivity of the "web 2.0"? There are numerous interesting protocols to build upon (openid, the extensible XMPP..., etc..), and startups should use them and respect their users data. Concerning social networks there seem to be some alternatives (Elgg, OpenSocial APIs) but could a startup build something more open and still profitable on those?
- gaius 18y ago
  The thing all those interesting protocols have in common is that they mean absolutely nothing to 99% of people who joined Facebook because that's where their friends were, that's where photos are tagged and event invites are sent from.
  - plesn 18y ago
    I totally agree. But that's called a situation of monopoly. Shouldn't we be able to have inpact on laws that would protect us, and enforce more transparency and more openned up interfaces?
    - gaius 18y ago
      How is FB a monopoly?
      - plesn 18y ago
        You can change of social network (it's not a Microsoft-like monopoly), but as everybody's in it you have to be in it by pure network effect. In other markets like Brazil, everybody is on Orkut, so no real choice either, you have to be on Orkut. Idem for the music niche for myspace.
        18y ago
trickjarrett 18y ago
I want to understand the legal structure that allows this. The TOS I agreed to most certainly did not agree to the permanent control of this data. Why am I now bound to this new one?
- jerf 18y ago
  The TOS that you did sign almost certainly contained a clause that said something to the effect of "You further agree that we may make any change to these terms in the future, and you will continue to be bound by them." If that bothers you, bad news: Damn near every contract you sign nowadays contains that clause. The better terms of service will permit you to at least cancel the contract after a term change if you do not consent. My CC contract had that, and I bet it's because it's required by law. But I haven't seen that many other places. Now, this might sound like a horrible clause. And it probably is. On the other hand, contracts have a real need to be mutable, and for something like the Facebook TOS, you're basically dealing with millions of parties to the contract that simply can't be meaningfully "informed" about the nature of the contract or the nature of the changes. So, it's not just a problem with evil, greedy companies, it's also a problem with the fact that people are essentially incapable of understanding the TOS (due to either time or a literal inability to comprehend) and our legal system simply requires some sort of TOS to exist. The problem is complex and does not admit a simple solution.
  - Retric 18y ago
    They can say what they want but such changes to the contract is not enforceable in the US. If you sign up and they change the TOS you can use the old TOS and force them to remove your account.
    - joubert 18y ago
      Is there a way to find the TOS that was active at the time one signed up?
    - gaius 18y ago
      No you can't, not really. What about comments you left on someone's wall? What about replies you wrote that are now in someone's inbox? What about tags you added to other people's photos? Once you start to participate in something like Facebook, you really don't own the interactions you have via it. If anyone does "your network" does, but since that isn't an entity in any meaningful sense, Facebook the corporation must do.
mechanical_fish 18y ago
Would it spoil the party to point out that Facebook's original terms of service were insane? [1] That they promised something that Facebook was unable to deliver? They allowed you to post content to Facebook, wait until that content was quoted, copied, pasted, or remixed by others, then pull the content off and sue Facebook if any of those quotations, copies, or remixes persisted anywhere on Facebook's site. Ask the MPAA how well that would have worked out for you in practice. We all know that removing something which has been posted to the web is like removing the proverbial drop of food coloring from a swimming pool. With their new TOS, Facebook is stating something that's been true all along: They're running a swimming pool. Once your content is exposed to its userbase you can't take that content back. I am reminded of a passage in J. Michael Straczynski's screenwriting book where he talks about how important it is to avoid sending unsolicited manuscripts to movie or TV producers. They will send the manuscripts back unopened [2] and refuse to deal with you again, because: One individual I encountered had written a spec Terminator 3 script, hoping to either send it to producer James Cameron and later sue Cameron because this person was sure this would be the next story or tempt Cameron to sue him, which would force Cameron to read the script, after which he would be so thoroughly blinded by the script's brilliance that he'd buy it instantly. (No, I'm not making this up.)... Unsolicited manuscripts are the constant nightmare of any producer. Perhaps Facebook has become large and old enough to have had its first encounter with such a copyright troll. The solution to this problem, as employed by every producer in Hollywood, is to require a release form before you'll read anything. --- [1] Note that I am not a lawyer. The lawyers in the audience are welcome to explain that I'm wrong. [2] "It will be returned in a larger envelope, unopened (although there will often be a tiny tear in one of the corners of the original envelope, made by a secretary to verify that it contained a script)." -- JMS
- plesn 18y ago
  What you're pointing here, is that even a "non-evil" company can nearly be forced by the sake of self-protection and simplicity to have abusive clauses. Maybe this shows the need of active regulation and arbitration in the domain. In France we have somthing supposed to ensure data privacy called "CNIL" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNIL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNIL ). Is there some equivalent in the US?
TweedHeads 18y ago
Like Firefox did, just create an open source social experience and we will move our friends and family to a more open and secure place. Never underestimate an angry customer...
- unalone 18y ago
  TweedHeads, it's really cute that you think that's why people went to Firefox, the whole open thing, but the average user doesn't know what plugins are. The big switch to FF came when it had tabs and IE 6 didn't. That's when I changed. It also rendered pages more accurately and loaded faster than IE 6. Nobody cares that it was open, and chances are people didn't care that it was secure. The idea of security is that you don't actively notice it. Facebook is secure already, and nobody cares that it's closed. If it was a shitty site that was also closed, then maybe an "open social experience" would come in handy, but Facebook also happens to be the best-designed popular site that's ever been made, it runs oily-smooth, and it has five hundred bazillion users. Never underestimate an angry customer... Like the 10 million angry customers that protested when Facebook redesigned and lost its little guy logo? Or that protested that you can't change Facebook to other colors? Because I have friends that joined those groups, and they're still on Facebook. "Mildly irritated" customers can be underestimated, for the most part. They don't do anything.
  - TweedHeads 18y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485460 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485460 Never underestimate an angry customer...
lgriffith 18y ago
The Cloud absorbs all. Once you live there, your life becomes one with the Cloud. You no longer belong to you. The only answer is never to have joined the Cloud. It is already too late. Resistance is futile.
indigoviolet 18y ago
Facebook's response: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54434097130 http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54434097130

83 points by manvsmachine 18y ago

Well, it's a natural power grab. If you can grab it, why not: who knows what financial benefits may appear later. Some day a 21st Century "Diary of Ann Frank" might start with notes made on FB. Won't FB want to take advantage of print/advert/movie rights. $$$ "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

jacquesm 18y ago
they may want it and they may claim they've got it but I highly doubt it would fly. The manufacturer of the paper you write on does not get to claim copyright, you do.
- zzkt 18y ago
  Did you actually read the terms of service?
  - unalone 18y ago
    Yeah. They're very "You're not allowed to get mad at us if your stuff stays on the database after you're gone, because it's really hard for us to make sure it all disappears." If you're paranoid/have never used a site with TOS, that sounds like "We want to steal your creative ideas," but I assure you that if Facebook ever did something like that, they would get pounded hard and lose users. HN had this exact discussion with the Gmail TOS, I believe, and people were worried that Google would be stealing their emailed poetry. Sites really aren't evil. You've got to trust me on this, most sites aren't saying "How can we potentially steal a million dollars in the off-chance that one of our users posts up a movie script as a note rather than, say, sending it off to an executive?" Rather, they're saying, "Look, we're getting a lot of people who're being dicks about how we keep their data so that if they want to return their account magically comes back, and we think that it's better to keep that data than to remove it, because that way the people who delete accounts stupidly can come back and be happy they don't have to start again. At the same time, it's true that we're retaining data we shouldn't retain. So let's just add to our TOS that we're allowed to do that, since most people won't care, and since it means we can provide a useful service that'll help more people than it will piss off."
    - indigoviolet 18y ago
      Thank you, one person with sense amidst all this stupid trigger happy paranoia.

pierrefar 18y ago

Well that $15b valuation has to come from somewhere. What this says is they want to be a media company with millions of producers.

gaius 18y ago
Facebook wants not to be sued if someone's boss sees something they shouldn't and fires that someone. That's the real reason for this policy. By uploading content to FB you absolve them of responsibility for whom they show it to. Seriously, you think a million bad cameraphone pictures of people getting drunk are worth $15Bn?
- pierrefar 18y ago
  I never said that, or more accurately, the sarcasm about them being a media company didn't come through in my sentence. There is also the element of trust. What you describe is a sensible thing to protect against, but I have that gut feeling that the new policy is covering a new approach FB may take. Something feels wrong with having this wording of this policy, so I mistrust the intentions behind this new policy until evidence to the contrary emerges. I'm not holding my breath.
- c00p3r 18y ago
  The idea of make and sell trend and analytical reports is on the surface. At least they and google did it for 'internal' use.
thepanister 18y ago
Well... Facebook is not worth the $15b... but I think it was made just for propaganda purposes.. They wanted the press to keep a spot on Facebook!

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

Rod 18y ago

Would it be too far-fetched to claim that Facebook's evil terms of use create an opportunity for a new photo-sharing platform? Facebook makes it very easy to share photos. What if one could still share photos with friends on Facebook, but these photos were not uploaded to Facebook's server?

mseebach 18y ago
A quick google reveals serveral Flickr for Facebooks apps.. but I think a major value-driver for photos on FB is tagging of friends, and the "see all photos of..", "see photos of NN and me" features, and I think those are difficult/impossible to tap into without using FB's own photo app (although I don't know). An idea could be to make an app that will upload deliberately crippled (low resolution, watermark), yet recognizable, pictures to FB, and a high-quality copy on Flickr, so tags work, but when you go the to picture, there's a note "I won't let FB own my stuff, see a high quality version of this pic on (Flickr-link) that I own. Posted by CoolPhotoApp."..
- unalone 18y ago
  If I was on Facebook and a friend of mine started doing that, I would unfriend him for being a dick. If he tagged me in a low-res picture, so that all my friends looking for my photos would see a blurry me in the mix, I'd be pretty pissed off. Or worse: I'd ban the application, as is my prerogative, and suddenly I don't see any of these photos at all and that app destroys photos entirely.

plesn 18y ago

A non-evil social network would have to be distributed and based on open protocols: you could be @facebook.com but could interact with people on other networks so that users would have choice. They could even have their own server. The net and the web were built like that, but now why are we building "jails" within the compelling interactivity of the "web 2.0"? There are numerous interesting protocols to build upon (openid, the extensible XMPP..., etc..), and startups should use them and respect their users data. Concerning social networks there seem to be some alternatives (Elgg, OpenSocial APIs) but could a startup build something more open and still profitable on those?

gaius 18y ago
The thing all those interesting protocols have in common is that they mean absolutely nothing to 99% of people who joined Facebook because that's where their friends were, that's where photos are tagged and event invites are sent from.
- plesn 18y ago
  I totally agree. But that's called a situation of monopoly. Shouldn't we be able to have inpact on laws that would protect us, and enforce more transparency and more openned up interfaces?
  - gaius 18y ago
    How is FB a monopoly?
    - plesn 18y ago
      You can change of social network (it's not a Microsoft-like monopoly), but as everybody's in it you have to be in it by pure network effect. In other markets like Brazil, everybody is on Orkut, so no real choice either, you have to be on Orkut. Idem for the music niche for myspace.
      - 18y ago

trickjarrett 18y ago

I want to understand the legal structure that allows this. The TOS I agreed to most certainly did not agree to the permanent control of this data. Why am I now bound to this new one?

jerf 18y ago
The TOS that you did sign almost certainly contained a clause that said something to the effect of "You further agree that we may make any change to these terms in the future, and you will continue to be bound by them." If that bothers you, bad news: Damn near every contract you sign nowadays contains that clause. The better terms of service will permit you to at least cancel the contract after a term change if you do not consent. My CC contract had that, and I bet it's because it's required by law. But I haven't seen that many other places. Now, this might sound like a horrible clause. And it probably is. On the other hand, contracts have a real need to be mutable, and for something like the Facebook TOS, you're basically dealing with millions of parties to the contract that simply can't be meaningfully "informed" about the nature of the contract or the nature of the changes. So, it's not just a problem with evil, greedy companies, it's also a problem with the fact that people are essentially incapable of understanding the TOS (due to either time or a literal inability to comprehend) and our legal system simply requires some sort of TOS to exist. The problem is complex and does not admit a simple solution.
- Retric 18y ago
  They can say what they want but such changes to the contract is not enforceable in the US. If you sign up and they change the TOS you can use the old TOS and force them to remove your account.
  - joubert 18y ago
    Is there a way to find the TOS that was active at the time one signed up?
  - gaius 18y ago
    No you can't, not really. What about comments you left on someone's wall? What about replies you wrote that are now in someone's inbox? What about tags you added to other people's photos? Once you start to participate in something like Facebook, you really don't own the interactions you have via it. If anyone does "your network" does, but since that isn't an entity in any meaningful sense, Facebook the corporation must do.

mechanical_fish 18y ago

Would it spoil the party to point out that Facebook's original terms of service were insane? [1] That they promised something that Facebook was unable to deliver? They allowed you to post content to Facebook, wait until that content was quoted, copied, pasted, or remixed by others, then pull the content off and sue Facebook if any of those quotations, copies, or remixes persisted anywhere on Facebook's site. Ask the MPAA how well that would have worked out for you in practice. We all know that removing something which has been posted to the web is like removing the proverbial drop of food coloring from a swimming pool. With their new TOS, Facebook is stating something that's been true all along: They're running a swimming pool. Once your content is exposed to its userbase you can't take that content back. I am reminded of a passage in J. Michael Straczynski's screenwriting book where he talks about how important it is to avoid sending unsolicited manuscripts to movie or TV producers. They will send the manuscripts back unopened [2] and refuse to deal with you again, because: One individual I encountered had written a spec Terminator 3 script, hoping to either send it to producer James Cameron and later sue Cameron because this person was sure this would be the next story or tempt Cameron to sue him, which would force Cameron to read the script, after which he would be so thoroughly blinded by the script's brilliance that he'd buy it instantly. (No, I'm not making this up.)... Unsolicited manuscripts are the constant nightmare of any producer. Perhaps Facebook has become large and old enough to have had its first encounter with such a copyright troll. The solution to this problem, as employed by every producer in Hollywood, is to require a release form before you'll read anything. --- [1] Note that I am not a lawyer. The lawyers in the audience are welcome to explain that I'm wrong. [2] "It will be returned in a larger envelope, unopened (although there will often be a tiny tear in one of the corners of the original envelope, made by a secretary to verify that it contained a script)." -- JMS

plesn 18y ago
What you're pointing here, is that even a "non-evil" company can nearly be forced by the sake of self-protection and simplicity to have abusive clauses. Maybe this shows the need of active regulation and arbitration in the domain. In France we have somthing supposed to ensure data privacy called "CNIL" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNIL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNIL ). Is there some equivalent in the US?

TweedHeads 18y ago

Like Firefox did, just create an open source social experience and we will move our friends and family to a more open and secure place. Never underestimate an angry customer...

unalone 18y ago
TweedHeads, it's really cute that you think that's why people went to Firefox, the whole open thing, but the average user doesn't know what plugins are. The big switch to FF came when it had tabs and IE 6 didn't. That's when I changed. It also rendered pages more accurately and loaded faster than IE 6. Nobody cares that it was open, and chances are people didn't care that it was secure. The idea of security is that you don't actively notice it. Facebook is secure already, and nobody cares that it's closed. If it was a shitty site that was also closed, then maybe an "open social experience" would come in handy, but Facebook also happens to be the best-designed popular site that's ever been made, it runs oily-smooth, and it has five hundred bazillion users. Never underestimate an angry customer... Like the 10 million angry customers that protested when Facebook redesigned and lost its little guy logo? Or that protested that you can't change Facebook to other colors? Because I have friends that joined those groups, and they're still on Facebook. "Mildly irritated" customers can be underestimated, for the most part. They don't do anything.
- TweedHeads 18y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485460 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485460 Never underestimate an angry customer...

lgriffith 18y ago

The Cloud absorbs all. Once you live there, your life becomes one with the Cloud. You no longer belong to you. The only answer is never to have joined the Cloud. It is already too late. Resistance is futile.

indigoviolet 18y ago

Facebook's response: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54434097130 http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54434097130