As most people on the Interwebs know by now, social networking giant Facebook made a slight change to its terms of service (TOS) recently that had a big impact on what the site could do with your content.
As the original post on The Consumerist blog reported, the TOS states this:
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.
The original TOS, however, included this passage at the end of the section quoted above:
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.
Basically, Facebook’s tweaking of the TOS meant that it had rights to your content forever — even if you cancel your Facebook account!
The uproar caused by The Consumerist post eventually led Facebook to revert back to its old TOS early Wednesday morning — a temporary move by Facebook as it reviews language to create revised TOS that will address the fears and concerns of the site’s users.
However, during all this, I discovered something a bit odd while using FriendFeed, a link-sharing service that has the ability to feed content into my Facebook profile’s “wall.” During the Facebook firestorm over the past few days, I posted two articles about Facebook to my FriendFeed account.
Neither made it onto my Facebook wall.
Every other article and link I shared with FriendFeed made it onto my Facebook wall…but not the two stories I shared that were about Facebook itself. If you happen to be a friend of mine on Facebook, go to my profile and click on the FriendFeed tab. You will see all the links I shared with FriendFeed are there, including the two Facebook-related items.
But go back to my wall…and the two stories are not there. And I did not delete them, that’s for sure.
So this blog post will be another test to see if there is some kind of filtering going on over at Facebook. This blog feeds into my FriendFeed account so it should technically wind up on my Facebook wall.
If it doesn’t, I think Facebook needs to answer why this is happening…because it would look a lot like censorship to me.
And, just to be fair, I will update this post to let any readers down the road know what happened.
Stay tuned!
UPDATE…OK, so this post appeared on my Facebook wall, but there is still something troubling me about why the Facebook news links I shared via FriendFeed did not make it there.
Brian Kelley 