liberty central's civil liberties villain of the week: Facebook
Drumroll, please: the first liberty central award for corporate privacy abuse goes to ... Facebook, in recognition of its attempt to lay "an irrevocable, perpetual" claim to users' original content.
Under Facebook's previous terms of service, the company's right to your original content expired if you deleted your account. On February 4, it announced it had updated the terms of service. Sharp-eyed users quickly realised the new conditions retrospectivly granted the company the right to retain their old content – even if they closed their account, Facebook retained the right to market and licence their pictures and blogposts in perpetuity.
Facebook defended the new terms, with its founder Mark Zuckerberg posting a blog titled On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information, which could be crudely summarised as "trust us". But yesterday, the company was forced to perform a U-turn, ditching the new stipulations in the face of heavy criticism from privacy campaigners, the threat of legal action and revolt by users. One Facebook group, People Against the New Terms of Service, grew to a membership of more than 109,000 in a matter of days. The company has now reinstated the old terms of service and has promised users more imput via a new Facebook group called the Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.
Perhaps the real problem with Facebook is that it creates an illusion of privacy, while in reality your private thoughts will eternally reside in cyberspace. With a new study suggesting social networking sites can damage our health by reducing the time we spend building relationships face-to-face, perhaps its time we all log off and get a life?
Nominate your civil liberties villain of the week in the comments below.