Facing a federal complaint from a leading privacy advocacy organization, and a revolt of tens of thousands of its users, Facebook on Wednesday backed down from what many have seen as an onerous privacy policy.
The policy had seemed to grant Facebook perpetual rights to users' uploaded content, and the threatened complaint from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) had demanded, essentially, that the social networking service return to its previous terms. The EPIC was preparing to file a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post Wednesday that the company had decided to do just that: "Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input.
Must read: B.T.W Blog
It's been one rough week for social networking phenomenon Facebook. Two weeks after it revised the site's terms of service...
- Friday, February 20 2009
By Eileen Yu
"Going forward, we've decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don't plan to leave it there for long," Zuckerberg said.
He also said the company would be adopting a new set of terms that would more carefully take users' rights into consideration. "More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren't just a document that protect our rights; it's the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world. Given its importance, we need to make sure the terms reflect the principles and values of the people using the service," he explained.
"Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we'll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms."
Site users promptly received an update pushed out to their pages, which read: "Over the past few days, we have received a lot of good feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised."
The move came after Facebook had, earlier in the day, polled its users as to whether it should revert to its previous terms. And in his blog, Zuckerberg said that the company would be asking users to get involved in crafting the next set of terms.
"If you'd like to get involved in crafting our new terms, you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we've created--Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I'm looking forward to reading your input," Zuckerberg wrote.
The social networking site this week clocked 175 million active users, five years after it was first established in 2004.
This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.
Play video
unbelievable
I just can't believe they went back on their TOS change. People are dumb if they think they are getting any privacy from Facebook or Myspace. All they are doing is voluntarily supplying valuable info to huge marketing mills. Although there are ways to communicate with privacy: anonymous sites like www.anonboard.com
Posted by Smokewell Bluntson on Friday, February 20 2009 01:17 PM