Should you be wary of the new Facebook Terms of Service?

UPDATE 2: In addition to scaling back the terms of service, Facebook is letting their users help them write the next version of the terms of service. How's that for treating your users right?

UPDATE: It seems that enough people got angry and voiced their concerns. Facebook has scaled back the Terms of Service to the previous version as they revisit the privacy needs of their users.

A few weeks ago, the folks over at Facebook edited their Terms of Service (ToS) to reflect the current thinking in the online social networking space. It's making a lot of folks a bit nervous, however, as it states that they have full rights to everything that you add to Facebook forever, no matter what you do. Should we worry about this?

The recent ToS change wasn't a major change from the previous language. Facebook used to have rights to everything that you put on their network until you removed said content. At that point, they no longer maintained rights to your stuff, though they would keep copies of it on their servers.

As an aside, for a great comparison of different social network ToS agreements, check out Dr. Amanda French's post here.

This recent language change stripped that crucial part from the ToS. Now, if you delete your content, they will retain that content and their right to use that content. The language shows that they have a perpetual worldwide license to your content, with the right to sublicense it (i.e., redistribute it). Also, if you don't like it, you automatically agree to arbitration!

Why are they doing this?

Facebook promises that they're not out to get you. They claim that they made this change because the emerging social network landscape demands it. The folks at Facebook believe that even if you close your account, the content that you shared with other users should persist, not disappear. Think about what would happen if I left the university and every e-mail that I ever sent disappeared from each recipient's archived mail. It seems weird, right? By that logic, they want your stuff to stay and exist in perpetuity even if you decide to go.

I can't say that I disagree with their point, but it does raise some interesting issues:

Privacy - What happens if you run for public office and all of the embarrassing pictures of you that you thought were removed from Facebook are easily mined from the system by your opponent? You lose the election!

Benevolent dictator argument - They don't claim actual ownership of your material now...but what happens when they do? You lose actual ownership of your content!

The landscape itself - I agree that the system needs to function properly. Content should show up where it is meant to show up for as long as it is meant to show. If it doesn't show properly, you get what you see out on the web when stuff disappears: links to ghost content, 404 (site not found) errors, etc. While I know that it is extremely difficult to code the logic that gives users elegant control over content, I still believe that it will prove necessary to do so as the social networking landscape develops.

I hope that users will demand control over their content, and that they demand that that control be as effective as the control that they have over the content on their own desktop machines. I think that this blanket statement of ownership is a lazy response to the very valid problem that Facebook face.