Tech & Biz

Mark Zuckerberg backs down on new Facebook terms of service

by Sanjay Jha | February 18, 2009 at 04:40 am

422 views | 24 Recommendations | 8 comments

In a major relief to millions of die hard fans of social network site Facebook, your photographs, videos and comments on Facebook are still yours, at least for the moment.

The social networking website has posted a statement on its site saying it has reverted to its former terms of use policy after thousands of users objected furiously to the site's new policy.

Facing a federal complaint from a leading privacy advocacy organization and a revolt of tens of thousands of its users, Facebook on Tuesday night backed down from what many have seen as an onerous privacy policy.

Facebook informed all its users that it has, temporarily at least, reverted its terms of service to the previous version.

(Credit: Screenshot by CNET Networks)

The policy had seemed to grant Facebook perpetual rights to users' uploaded content, and the threatened complaint from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) had demanded, essentially, that the social-networking service return to its previous terms.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post late Tuesday that the company had decided to do just that

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Uwe Paschen

at 04:46 on February 18th, 2009

Text, Photos, Video and other such items as long as original material have to remain in control of the one owning them or that created them. On all Web sites.

Edmund Jenks

at 06:59 on February 18th, 2009

Can Facebook, or any social site for that matter, ever be trusted from this point forward?

It's a little like trusting an Obama Cabinet appointee to have paid all of his/her taxes before being placed into consideration for appointment.

Texrat (not verified)

at 07:44 on February 18th, 2009

Yeah, or trusting anyone in the former Bush administration to be ethical.

Jordan Yerman

at 07:00 on February 18th, 2009

What did Zuckerberg think was going to happen? Why would he imagine that users would be anything other than angry?

Jordan Yerman

at 07:44 on February 18th, 2009

Just to add: it's not that Facebook's change was all that big (they better be caching content, or pageloads would be measured in minutes), but it was poorly explained, and the public's reaction (or overreaction) was really predictable.

When you're as big as Facebook, you need to understand that all eyes are on you at all times, and the world's social networkers are an excitable bunch.

The point isn't that Facebook or any other company shouldn't change their TOS to better reflect their businesses and technology, but that in this day and age, any "minor" change is going to attract lots of scrutiny, and, in all likelihood, will be misunderstood and misinterpreted. This makes the handling of the change much more important than the change itself.