A majority of SMU students know about Facebook, the networking site that rivals MySpace in popularity and now maintains a reach over everything, from petty gossip to job screening.
People actively using the service should know one more thing: Facebook now has irrefutable rights over users, thier ideas and works included.
It is all in the recently updated Terms of Service. The legal language specifies, as it did before the change, that Facebook retains the right to license any user content without expressing permission. By joining the site, users grant the site the right to this license.
What has been removed, however, is a little piece that says, “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,” according to web.archive.org.
The “Termination and Changes” section of the Terms of Service further affirms that the “license” section referenced survives the termination of accounts – which can be performed for “any or no reason, at any time in our sole discretion, with or without notice,” according to the Web site.
The real question is, what does this mean for users?
Any information shared on the site can be lawfully distributed to other parties like telemarketers and hackers. It means that any creative works or ideas shared with others through writing can be used by Facebook for any purpose, unless there is a clear legal protection (e.g. copyright, patent).
It means a potential abuse of freedom of speech, as Facebook has the right to expel users for, say, ‘unfavorable’ political opinions and then give away identities to interested government officials, while benefiting in any way from submissions.
An article in The Consumerist says, the “convenience” of mandatory binding arbitration, the kind laid out in Facebook’s Terms of Service, means that users cannot subpoena, interrogate or discover.
Since arbitrator’s are not public officials, but paid for by the involved parties – in these cases the richer corporation often picks the arbitrator – they are highly unlikely to rule in the consumer’s favor.
One study cited by the Christian Science Monitor reports that even the least used arbitrators only judge in favor of consumers 38 percent of the time; the most used, 1.6 percent of the time. Most arbitrators’ decisions turn out to be “non-appealable.”
The only loophole an angry consumer will find with Facebook is the company’s California location, as that is the only state which keeps records of arbitrations, offering some slim hope of an appeal.
All of this leads to a basic Lockian concern: How should we protect the words and works of individuals in a social setting?
With regards to this matter, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg posted an interesting point on the company’s blog. “There is no system today that enables me to share my e-mail address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with,” Zuckerberg wrote.
The tenet’s main problem is an exchange of e-mail addresses, or similar isolated pieces of identity, between non-corporate entities offers much greater flexibility in terms of legal retort if an abuse of said pieces occurs.
Additionally, such details would more likely dissipate along the chain of social interaction, and lose meaningful context. But Facebook would never lose a grip on the data, which would always paint a complete enough picture to facilitate abuse – with little chance of retort.
One must also consider this precedent in other realms, like e-mail. Could the fiction story sent through a “Gmail” account to a friend become the property of Google without your expression permission? Could Microsoft disable a copy of Outlook because it deems a social exchange to be “undesirable” while retaining rights to an identity for any desirable corporate use? Could YouTube be allowed to keep videos when an account is terminated and avoid compensating users for benefits obtained?
