Under intense pressure from its users, Facebook has backed down and reverted to their earlier Terms of Service. This week the company changed their Terms of Service and the storm began. In a nutshell, Facebook worded the terms to state that they held a perpetual right to content you post on the service even if you deleted the content or your account. All of this was said to be contingent upon the level of access you granted to that content.
Now let’s be realistic, that shot of you arm-in-arm with your friends at the bar with drinks in hand isn’t going to be high on anyone’s priority list. Face it, you’ve got some competition in that department. However, there are also professionals, such as photographers, who use Facebook for marketing themselves. Under the new terms, they were putting their very livelihoods at risk.
I’ll admit the chances of Facebook actually doing anything nefarious with our content was fairly slim. The problem is where these kinds of changes lead. This was a grab to see what they could get away with and for now, it didn’t work. Like many other companies on the web, Facebook is constantly trying to increase their value and rightly so. Putting shackles on people’s content isn’t the way to do it. I’m glad the thunderings from users made them revert back to the old terms. We mustn’t let our guard down though. There are poorly lit, badly composed bar photos to protect.
