The controversy I wrote about yesterday has led to this response from Facebook:
A couple of weeks ago, we updated our terms of use to clarify a few points for our users. A number of people have raised questions about our changes, so I’d like to address those here. I’ll also take the opportunity to explain how we think about people’s information.
Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.
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.
So, this seems to be an entirely reasonable explanation for what, at first glance, seemed to be some very strange change to the TOS.
Of course, it’s probably worthwhile to keep this in mind:
The main point to remember, though, is that you should never share anything, online, even on facebook, that you would be uncomfortable having shared forever. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.
Indeed.
