Facebook Bill of Rights
2 Comments Published by Rodney Rumford February 18th, 2009 in Facebook, Facebook News.
There has been quite a stir in the past few days about facebook changing their terms and conditions. Many facebook users, bloggers and the media have hopped on the bandwagon and decided to give facebook some push back on their new restrictive terms and conditions that effectively gave facebook ownership of all content uploaded to their site. I expected many facebook users to become vocal about this issue and I actually chose not to blog about the issue for a day or 2 until the dust had settled and to offer some candid insights on to my feelings on this.
Well, just a few minutes ago Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a blog post (his second in as many days; which he has never done before) to elaborate more on this highly sensitive issue. “Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.
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.
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.”
It will take facebook most likely at least a month to get this document crafted properly after soliciting feedback from the community of 175 million Facebook users. Mark also elaborated by saying “You have my commitment that we’ll do all of these things, but in order to do them right it will take a little bit of time. We expect to complete this in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we’ve changed the terms back to what existed before the February 4th change, which was what most people asked us for and was the recommendation of the outside experts we consulted.”
I seriously hope that they take some time to get their heads around this issue as well as the associated issues of allowing people to have more portability of their social graph outside of facebook. This is an important issue for Facebook to get right. It is my belief that the more open they are;the better it is for everyone.
Facebook has decided to be more open and solicit feedback on this very sensitive and complicated issue. They have created the Facebook Bill of Rights Group. Check out the group and give them your feedback.
You can read Mark’s 2 complete blog post on these issues here:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54746167130
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54434097130
How can they make such a communication mistake again after the Beacon affair last year? FB is an incredible platform, but the user relationship management just does not exist.
amateur hour! reverting their terms says so much about how facebook is operating on a whim. they lack a long-term goal that can compete with open-(id/social/whatever)