Facebook Retreats On Terms Of Service
February 20, 2009 (NPR)
There has been a huge backlash to Facebook's change in their terms of service (ToS), wherein the little-known license on user content would not expire even if a Facebook member deleted his or her account. As a result, Facebook announced that it had reversed the change to its policy, while it continues to figure out how best to address the issue of who controls information shared on social networks.
Facebook released an announcement stating that Facebook "doesn't claim rights to any of your photos or other content. We need a license in order to help you share information with your friends, but we don't claim to own your information." And Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, told users in a blog post Monday that "on Facebook, people own their information and control who they share it with."
But this wasn't enough to quell user protests, and the site also created a group called "Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities," designed to let users give input on Facebook's terms of use. It also apologized for what it called "the confusion around these issues."
This is not the first controversy between Facebook and its users over the notion of control of one's personal information. In late 2007, a tracking tool called "Beacon" caught users off guard by broadcasting information about their shopping habits and activities at other web sites. After initially defending the practice, Facebook ultimately allowed users to turn Beacon off.
The notion of who is the owner of a user's personal information, publically or privately shared, is and will continue to be a critical issue as people become more and more interconnected through the internet. Whether it be social communities today or e-Health records in the not too distant future, the ubiquity of sharing data across the internet points to the fact that controlling one's personal information is critical. The latest uproar over Facebook's ToS changes only goes to show that this issue is of utmost concern to individuals everywhere.
YOUnite's patented technology offers a unique solution to the problem of data security and specifically addresses the issue of data control and access to personal information through the notion of "distributed sharing of personal identity attributes". By applying YOUnite's patented technology to the social network scenario in particular, a user would be able to decide what pieces of information would be accessible by which individuals. Moreover, the user's personal information would not have to be stored on any third party networks
--- it could be stored directly on their own devices --- thereby enabling the user to have complete control of their data at all times.
What this means in the Facebook scenario is that when a user decides to remove permission to view or access their photos or videos for example, those photos or videos become permanently unavailable to anyone other than the user; they are truly 'deleted'.
Add, delete and selectively share your personal information on an individual basis with complete granularity and control is one of the many advantages to using YOUnite technology.
For more information, please visit our website and while you're there, read through our Resources Section for specific Use Cases and White Papers.