Delete your Facebook now

[spudtater]

The new Facebook Terms of Use includes the following paragraph:

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.

Crucially, the recent change removes the following paragraph from the Terms of Use:

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.

Link: 'Facebook's New Terms Of Service: "We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever."', The Consumerist, Feb 15 2009

You can delete, rather than simply 'deactivate', your Facebook using the following URL: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

UPDATE: They've backed down on this. New terms of use will be drawn up soon. Keep watching the skies tubes.

Comments

[scotm.livejournal.com]

Thank you. My facebook account is now dust.

[spudtater.livejournal.com]

<Britain size="Little">Dust! Dust!</Britain>

[yodathedark.livejournal.com]

They've said it's to enable content sharing. The various updates on that post note that.

[spudtater.livejournal.com]

This goes some way to explaining why the first paragraph is present (even if it is massively overpowerful for such a use), and is one of the reasons why I didn't protest too much about the TOS when joining Facebook in the first place.

However, the crux of the matter is in the removal of the second paragraph. Before, I could effectively say "yes, do anything you like with my data for now, but if I don't like what you're doing, I shall remove it from the site". It's an emergency escape clause, the presence of which is incredibly important.

There is absolutely no reason related to "content sharing" that Facebook would need rights to my data after I have requested it be removed. This move is heavy-handed and disturbing, and I am appalled that Facebook would take it — especially when it assumes my implicit consent.

(One thing I am definitely going to check before joining another networking site is such an implicit consent clause — agreeing to such a clause is just asking to be fucked about like this. Lesson learned.)