We highlighted the data scraping rights in
Facebook's TOS last year - well, its now got worse. It now reads:
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. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.
But there used to be a bit about cancelling all that if you wanted to or left Facebook, they used to say:
You retain the copyright to your content. When you upload your content you grant us a license to use and display
your content.
and.....
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.
That's gone now - once you're gone your data lives on and on and on................... and we suspect if you've got anything feeding your site that too will keep going.
Now, we were
thrown off Facebook about a year ago, and when I asked for confirmation that our data would be removed, confirmation had I none, so the de facto policy even before this was probably to keep their hands on it. But what this means is the stuff thet glean from you on that 25 things about you meme is theirs to use, and if you've been dumb enough to let them scrape where you've been and gone, it will persists long after you've exited the site.
Funnily enough, the debate is being waged by the
New York Times as we write, when they argue:
Perhaps a more direct explanation is that data collection is part of what Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, calls “the surveillance business model.” That is, there is money to be made from knowing your customers well — with a depth unimaginable before Internet cookies allowed companies to track obsessively online behavior.
“We took whatever was done offline and put it on steroids,” she said, perhaps with the Rodriguez case in the back of her mind. “It requires compliance with the kind of promises that comes with this kind of data collection.”
The foundation argues that online service providers — social networks, search engines, blogs and the like — should voluntarily destroy what they collect, to avoid the kind of legal controversies the baseball players’ union is now facing. The union is being criticized for failing to act during what apparently was a brief window to destroy the 2003 urine samples before the federal prosecutors claimed them. “You don’t want to know that stuff,” she says, speaking of the ordinary blogger collecting data on every commenter. “You don’t want to get a subpoena. For ordinary Web sites it is a cost to collect all this data.”
The digital format makes it easy to cling to material that normally would be disposed of or would disintegrate. Storage is cheap and practically limitless. And Ms. Cohn says of the people who dominate the Internet, “the people who design software, in my experience, tend to be pack rats.”
Arguing for data removal is all very well, but judging by the fight that Google's been putting up to the European Commission these companies will be extremely reluctant, and even if ordered to do so it will probably be kept underhand, anyway without rigorous checking.
No, the best option in future will probably be to lie as much as possible on the social nets and to use data scrubbers and obfusticators when using services like Google. Sadly, the rank and file users seem not to care about privacy issues judging by their behaviour.
(Ironically enough, I picked up on all this via Twitter - which does not have the same privacy issues as Facebook)
Update - no, trust us says Facebook,
Users Control the Data:
One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.
In reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work. Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment.
In reality, they have taken away the previous legal protections users had, so one needs to look at what they are doing, not saying. In Game Theory one differentiates between strong and weak tells, a "strong tell" in this case would be a some form of commitment to back up the words. A weak tell, like a banker's apology, carries no such commitment...
