SiliconBeat

Facebook responded to our question about the changes to their terms of service that has caused such consternation among users with an e-mail at 7:30 p.m., long after our deadline. At that point, Facebook users were joining the People Against the New Terms of Service Group at the rate of 5,000 per hour. Here’s what the spokesperson had to say:

“Please find below the information I can provide regarding the update to our Terms of Use.  The following statement can be attributed to ‘the company’ or ‘a Facebook spokesperson’:

“‘We are not claiming and have never claimed ownership of material that users upload.  The new Terms were clarified to be more consistent with the behavior of the site.  That is, if you send a message to another user (or post to their wall, etc…), that content might not be removed by Facebook if you delete your account (but can be deleted by your friend).  Furthermore, it is important to note that this license is made subject to the user’s privacy settings.  So any limitations that a user puts on display of the relevant content (e.g. To specific friends) are respected by Facebook. Also, the license only allows us to use the information ‘in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.’  Users generally expect and understand this behavior as it has been a common practice for web services since the advent of webmail.  For example, if you send a message to a friend on a webmail service, that service will not delete that message from your friend’s inbox if you delete your account.

“One of the most important goals of the new Terms was to be more open to users by being more clear about how their data was handled.  We certainly did not — and did not intend — to create any new right or interest for Facebook in users’ data by issuing the new Terms.  None of the news or blog reports at the time we announced them on February 4 suggested any confusion or misunderstanding.

“As you already know from reading Mark’s response, our company blog includes two recent postings about our Terms.  Please feel free to attribute quotes from these postings to their respective authors.  Suzie White, Facebook’s Corporate Counsel for Commercial Transactions (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=50531412130) introduced the update to our Terms on February 4th.  Mark Zuckerberg answered questions yesterday (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54434097130).     “

Just to set some context, I’m about the last person you want to ask about things like privacy, because, for the most part, I just don’t care. Granted, I am perhaps totally alone on the Internet when it comes to this viewpoint. But there it is.

So it was with a deep sigh and a giant eye roll that I read about the latest dust-up involving Facebook and privacy. In a nutshell, Facebook has tweaked its Terms of Service to say: Read the rest of this entry »

A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008 was filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by four affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Joining as plaintiffs in the action was Tom Campbell, a former U.S. Congressman who represented a portion of Silicon Valley for five terms and who recently stepped down as dean of Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley, as well as Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, privacy advocates went into a tizzy over the ruling by a New York judge that YouTube must turn over all its data about which videos that its users watch to Viacom. The latter is suing YouTube, which is owned by Google, over copyright infringement.

It’s a reminder, of course, of what lies at the heart of the Internet. In essence, companies like Google have turned the Internet into a vast collector of personal data which they then use to figure out how to get us to watch, read or buy more stuff. The amount of knowledge a company like Google has about your personal Web surfing habits would likely boggle your mind if you knew the full extent of it.

But the outcry left me wondering just what everyone was so worked up about.

Read the rest of this entry »