Facebook respond to the voice against it's new TOS

Okay based on the subject of my last post just yesterday, the CEO of Facebook - Mark Zukerberg has responded by making a post on facebook about his new Terms of Service -- Seems like he was waiting for me to write it up on my blog :p

In his post he seem to clarify why facebook requires the License to own the content and keep it even after you die. He says that (1) without having the license he can not make our content available to our friends on facebook, (2) he needs to keep the contents as archived because, for example, you have sent an email to a friend and later you decide to close your account, the same email that was sent my you will be deleted from your "Sent Items" folder, but will be kept in your friends "inbox" folder and that's why they need to keep a copy of your content. Well it does make sense!

He also assures facebook users that facebook will not misuse our contents in any way that we may not like, his pep talk on the blog seem to me as if he wants people to "trust" facebook and keep using it. In his post he have created an impression that the contents will only be used on the facebook domains and no where else, and everything written in the TOS is for our (users) own benefit.

BUT, my toughs are... (which I tried to comment on his blog, but found the comments disabled)

That's a very good explanation and I probably believe what you say, but my primary concern is that if you can think of 20 words that just mean "use"... when you say "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)"... Can you not add your clarification into these type of words and edit this TOS once more?

I agree to you a 100% but when it comes to legal issues this blog doesn't mean anything, what does mean something is the TOS page and what it has written in it using 20 alternate words for one word, meaning almost the same and that is "its mine now, ha ha ha".

You may need to clarify when you say "Publicly perform or display", what "public" are you referring to? is it the advertisers, looking for targeted ads? When you say "edit, modify" what sort of editing do you refer to? And above all when you say "Create Derivative work and distribute (through Multiple tiers)" what exactly are your "tiers" and what sort of "derivative work" do you intend to create from user contents.

You need to clearly mention where our information will go, on which domains it will be presented to and what parties may have acces to our content such as law enforcement agencies, advertisers etc.

With the number of current facebook users, I highly doubt that there would be any significant affects if a few hundred users quit using facebook because of this. But at least one should be careful of what he posts. People seem to take online social networks very lightly and differently than real life social grouping, what I believe is that online social network is a place where you need to be more careful than the real life because you don't know when something comes back and bite you on your face - don't forget everything on the Internet is in written / material form and you have allowed it to be owned by someone else.

Update: I saw an article just after making this post, the article is about a killer posting on Facebook about his time in jail. Read the complete article that tells how many criminals and even criminals doing time use facebook FROM PRISON -- for cryin' out loud.

Still feel like posting your families and friend up there?