Facebook reverts to old privacy policy

Facebook had reworded its terms of service on Feb. 4 by deleting a clause that stated that users “may remove [their] user content from the site at any time” and replacing it with a sentence stating that all “user content” would “survive any termination of [users’] use of the Facebook service.” The substitution of this clause, which would have allowed Facebook to preserve personal information indefinitely, ignited a storm of controversy among users and consumer advocacy groups.

Zuckerberg said in a Facebook blog post early Wednesday morning that users had expressed concern over the changes. In making the choice to revert to the original language, he said, the company “decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms.”

The Consumerist, a consumer advocacy blog, first called attention to the changes Feb. 15, claiming that the new language would mean that “anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later.”

While the initial terms of service gave Facebook an “irrevocable, perpetual” license to “use, copy, store, retain, publicly perform or display … adapt, create derivative works, and distribute” anything users posted on their Facebook pages, the new terms of service would have meant that users could no longer prevent Facebook from using their content even after terminating their accounts, the Consumerist reported.

“Make sure you never upload anything you don’t feel comfortable giving away forever,” the blog said.

While Zuckerberg assured users Monday that Facebook “wouldn’t share [their] information in a way [they] wouldn’t want,” many Facebook users were skeptical of his assurances.

More than 100,000 people joined the Facebook group “People Against the new Terms of Service.” A statement on the group’s page said, “Consumers cannot be expected to rest on the assurance of the good intentions of companies without having some enforceable legal recourse.”

Edward Tenner ’65, a departmental guest at the University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), said in an e-mail that he was dubious of Facebook’s intentions in instituting the term’s revisions.

“The big question for me still is what they had in mind, why they wanted to do so in the first place,” Tenner said. “Is it just because it’s more expensive to scrub people’s data than to let it be, even if that part of the site can’t be crawled by search engines? Or did they have something else in mind, [such as] selling information to marketers?”

Joseph Hall, a postdoctoral research associate in CITP, said that the legality of changing terms of service without notifying users has come under scrutiny.

“In the Ninth Circuit, which covers most of the West Coast, there have been cases that go all the way up to the Court of Appeals that say that you have to have some sort of affirming action by the user” to enact changes in terms of service, Hall explained.

Though the wording for many online services indicates that the terms of service may be changed without notice, Hall said, currently evolving litigation could prevent companies from continuing to do this.