Facebook Reverts ToS Change After User Uproar 260
rarel writes "CNN and other media outlets report that Facebook reverted their TOS update and went back to using the previous one. 'The site posted a brief message on users' home pages that said it was returning to its previous "Terms of Use" policy "while we resolve the issues that people have raised."' Facebook's controversial changes to its Terms of Service, previously commented on Slashdot, included a mention that (users) 'may remove (their) User Content from the Site at any time. ... However, (they) acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of (their) User Content,' triggering a massive uproar from users and privacy groups."
Re:"Remember Facebook" (Score:3, Interesting)
Um. Yeah. Except this part:
"Your continued use of the Facebook Service after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms."
Both in the old and new terms of (mis)use, and I'll bet you any amount of money that it'll remain in whatever terms they and their lawyers come up with. It's a "get out of obeying our own rules free" card. The next time you log on to your Facebook account it could be under entirely new terms, NONE of which you actually -agree- with. But because you've signed in, you've implicitly agreed to whatever they tell you to. It doesn't matter how much user input they pretend to be putting into the process if they can reverse it on a whim and without notice, now does it?
humanity makes no sense. (Score:2, Interesting)
The banks, for exampl,e have stolen billions of dollars from all of us. Where's the protest, people? Where's the effort to find out what happened? Where's the organization to make radical change there?
What a terrible waste!
Facebook protesters, learn from this -- if you can achieve this, you can actually make real change in the world -- change that actually matters, not just some trivial thing on a here-today-gone-tomorrow, insubstantial, unimportant, fad website.
Why don't... (Score:3, Interesting)
"When you delete your account, only your profile content will be deleted."
To cover the issues such as:
If you send a message to a user, and then you delete your account, they don't need to delete the message from you in that person's inbox
Or, if you submitted a picture via the graffiti app etc, they don't need to delete your entry on the other person's profile, etc.
They made it worse (Score:3, Interesting)
Facebook showed fear to users. Never do that.
Now the users will think they can control things.
If they're quick, break out the LARTs, and delete a few thousand accounts(You asked us not to retain your data, you didn't mean right now?), they might get things back under control.
Re:Oh, I'm sure that this will last. (Score:5, Interesting)
Never underestimate the ignorance of many lawyer types.
Or their ability to find BS stuff to do in order to validate their existence.
I won't even tell you about the lawyers I've had to battle (in 2 different corporations) because they wanted a complete list of all of the Open Source libraries and associated copyrights, BEFORE we even started the project.
They'd heard all about this "Open Source" thing and how evil it could be, after all, and wanted to protect the company.
They wouldn't green light the project until we provided that list, and yet we didn't even really know what we were building for them, never mind what we were using.
The nice thing, though, was that we picked every POSSIBLE library that we could find and submitted them and their copyrights for their analysis/aproval.
We had 4 developers spend an entire week doing that. At the client's expense.
The end result was that the lawyer eventually backed down on their request, but not until after we outlined all of the expenses incurred as a result of their initial request.
The owner of that company canned the lawyer shortly after that.
But that was still a solid week of wasted time that I'll never get back.
Start your own social network (Score:1, Interesting)
Why don't you stop complaining and simply start your own social network with more user friendly TOS. After all, if Facebook's TOS are as bad as you say, then it should be a walk in the park to get your own social network going where the basis of your differentiation is friendly TOS. You'll be as rich and famous as Zuckerberg. What's stopping you?
Building is harder than whining.
Re:Oh, I'm sure that this will last. (Score:4, Interesting)
So, clearly, they had some reason for wanting to make the change. I'm guessing that that reason, whatever it is, didn't just vanish.
The previous blog entry [facebook.com] explains the reason: when you post your data it spills over to your friends accounts via inboxes etc. When you delete your account they don't want to have to hunt around all of your friends' and ex-friends' accounts to clean up all of that data, and they don't want to get in a legal mess by not cleaning it up.
I'm not sure I buy that completely: unless I use Facebook's messaging to send my email address say to a friend then it will only ever be stored against my record and deleting my record should clean it all up. And deleting all messages I created, and all notifications generated by my account should clean up the rest.