Conservative Rumblings

Facebook has never been the biggest proponents of user’s privacy, but now they’ve gone a step further and removed a key line from their TOS.

The section about keeping your info has not changed:

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.

However, the devil is in the details. This section was removed:

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.

So now, Facebook not only owns everything, they also can continue to use it even if you quit today. I automatically import all the blogs I write here into Facebook, and now I’ll have to rethink that. If it came to it, I’d challenge the legality of this under The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 but with the new administration being hostile to privacy and personal rights and Facebook being a multi-billion dollar company, somehow I doubt it would do much good.

(hat tip: Repurblican).