Licenses

You are solely responsible for the User Content that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.

If you own or control a website, you may place Facebook's share link button, logo and/or text (a "Share Link"), including all trademarks therein, on your website for the sole purpose of enabling users to Post links or content from your website on the Facebook Service. By offering a Share Link on your website, you agree, represent and warrant that you will not place a Share Link on any page containing content that would violate these Terms if Posted on the Facebook Service. The rights granted in this paragraph may be revoked by us at any time in our sole discretion, and upon such termination, you will immediately remove all Share Links from your website.

I just had an interesting conversation with a colleague regarding recent changes in Facebook's licence agreement (above).

Worryingly, Facebook, seem to claim rights to everything and anything that is deemed 'User Content'. It is not clear from their terms of service page when this was last updated (they claim 'Date of Last Revision: 39848.'. Googles Cache shows a version that is dated the 4th Feb 2009.

If you notice, even by sharing content in Facebook, by means of a share link, they claim copyright over the content of the shared data...

According to this consumerists article, the following couple of lines were removed in this version.

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 the following added:

The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.

Oh and you are bound by a thing called Mandatory Arbitration which is Eloquently illustrated here.

I'm not convinced its a recent change at all, but I have been considering closing my Facebook account anyway. Perhaps its always been like this, as lets face it, I don't often read EULA's.

When I think about it, any service that stores data about me, is going to have some control over that data, and probably is going to use it for their own purposes. We should not accept promises to 'do no evil' as famously said by google. Because, one day if not now, someone WILL do evil with our data.

Perhaps we should all have personal servers, like Want et al suggests in The Personal Server: Changing the Way We Think about Ubiquitous Computing. In which we explicitly control access to our personal profile data.