Another ex-Facebook alum tells his story (Why I Quit Facebook)
My daughter says I am paranoid because I do not trust strangers with my information. I think the correct word is cynical. You think you know what it means? Look it up.
Guess where you can read these terms and conditions that you have already agreed to?
" By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing."
Yes, friends, that means your data, your photos, your links, your info. For sale to the highest bidder. Can you hear me now?
4 comments:
Thanks! I referenced your blog to my family members and Jeanette, at least, was taken aback by FB's terms.
Rather than expose any of my actual personnae to ridicule, I registered on FB with a bogus name and an email address used for nothing else. I wanted to check out postings by people I know.
"User Content" was underwhelming, and I reaped a harvest of spam: not only the usual Canadian drugs and penis enlargement offers, but solicitations from purveyors of on-line surveys and even retail merchants. More than a dozen strangers sent offers to "friend" me. I declined to participate further.
So what is exactly your issue -- bad guys are going to read your page, determine you are at the mall, and steal your TV? Or Facebook, the company, is going to steal your vacation photos and sell them to a Russian porn site?
If you plain just don't want most people to know stuff about you -- then yeah, Facebook is probably too much exposure for you. But the idea that your Farmville score, back-of-the-head profile photo or a few fan pages are actually valuable commodities to be guarded and hoarded is a bit silly.
Sure, Facebook can try to sell targeted ads based on what it thinks you are interested in -- many places already do this, and we know it doesn't work too well.
I still find the information I get from Facebook -- what 300 people I care about are thinking about on a daily basis more useful than the minimal amount of information I have tossed back into the pot.
I confess that "I am not young enough to know everything" (Oscar Wilde) But I have an instinct about trouble. And these terms and conditions spell trouble with a capital P.
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