Facebook quietly changed its terms of service agreement (TOS) recently. Bloggers freaked, triggering a public uproar that forced Facebook to revert back to the older version and come up with a better TOS agreement.
The Facebook TOS always said, essentially, that the good people at Facebook can do anything they want with pictures and other content you upload. Those goofy pictures you uploaded of you and your high school buddies? Yeah, Facebook owns those.
The old, re-posted version of Facebook's TOS had a thin thread of user control in the form of an explicit termination of the full license when you delete something. The now-revoked new version took that away.
Here's what they (temporarily) changed. First, they removed the following passage:
"You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content."
And they added this:
"The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service."
The changes implied that anything you upload to Facebook belongs to Facebook forever, even after you delete everything and cancel your account, if that were even possible.
The mea culpa for this debacle came from CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a Facebook posting, in which he makes the case that Facebook needs such rights in order to legally facilitate user content sharing.
For more: Read the whole article Who's More Dumb: Facebook or its Users?
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