Brent Haeseker

Facebook Faceoff Goes Facedown

by Brent Haeseker on 19/02/09 at 2:56 am

Facebook spent this week doing damage control for their over bearing change to their Terms of Service agreement.

Facebook Faces Member Smackdown

Basically, they where stating they changed their terms of service and any content you as a member have posted to the site, whether currently up or previously deleted, belonged to Facebook. There was no advance warning, just an “I’m sorry, it’s ours now”, so even if you didn’t agree with the new terms and quit, you were still out of luck.

So what’s the deal?

Likely it is just a move to protect themselves from lawsuits, in case someone’s content that isn’t supposed to be on Facebook is still cached somewhere in their network.  But others have questioned whether it is a huge power grab of content.  Either way, Facebook’s new terms of service agreement doesn’t add up, and most members concur on this fact.  So much so, that it appears as of this writing that the previous terms of service agreement is back up.

This will be an interesting case study for a while to come on content ownership on social media websites, brand management and the power of a large membership to influence business decisions.