Saturday, March 21, 2009

I Know You Never Ever Read The User Agreement



How does it feel knowing that all of your personal information is in the hands of a 20-something CEO who is desperately trying to prove to investors the he can turn a profit on the internet? Well if you are one of the many users of Facebook, this is the situation you are in, and as CEO Mark Zuckerbeg recently proved, he is willing to go behind your back if it means turning a profit.

Recently Facebook pulled a fast one and changed their user agreement without so much as a post to the news feed. This would be fine if it were simply smoothing out the wording , or clarifying a point. Unfortunately it was a bold authoritarian move which can be summed up with the words, "I own you ." With the change, Facebook declared ownership over everything that you post, including contact information, wall posts, and even photos of yourself. Not only did they declare permanent ownership of what is currently posted on Facebook, but also what has been posted in accounts that have been deleted. It was only after a bored anon felt like rereading his user agreement, that the change was reported to several internet watchdog groups.

Naturally, the response from the public was overwhelmingly negative. A massive Facebook group was constructed within a day protesting the change. Zuckerberg tried to explain it away as a simple clarification in policy, rather than a regime change. Luckily no one drank the kool-aid, and the policy was changed back several days later.
While I don't think that Facebook should have the legal right to change their user agreement without first notifying their users, it does hit upon something that has always bothered me about how people use the internet. You know all of those boxes below long bits of text that you so flippantly click when signing up for a new online service? I know yo click them without reading the agreement. I know you think to yourself, "well if this were a bad thing to sign, it wouldn't be allowed." Wrong.

One thing that most people fail to understand is that the internet is quite literally the wild west of technology. It is relatively unbound by law, and the laws that are in place are so sparsely policed that if you wander outside of the sheriff's territory, you had better be ready to defend yourself. Luckily that isn't as hard or as dangerous as it was in the old west, but it does mean that if you aren't watching out, you can sign a whole chunk of yourself over to another entity with just the click of your mouse. Using social networking sites, and the internet in general, is somewhat of a Faustian bargain. You can have anything you want, but you can not have yourself. You can't have your privacy.

Whether you like it or not, once you post something to the internet, it's no longer private. I don't care how many passwords you have on that Photobucket account, or what you changed your privacy settings to. If it is on the internet, and someone wants it, it's as good as theirs. Take this into consideration. Employers scan Facebook when screening employees. Just because that photo of you passed out in a public restroom is for friends eyes only, doesn't mean they won't see it. More than likely they will. Now imagine that Facebook has a price for this information. They don't even have to break in or use a backdoor. This same price is offered to advertisers who want to know what you buy, how old you are, and where to send the spam to. Not only this, but even if you delete your account, Facebook is holding onto this picture for possible blackmailing opportunities in the future. (An extreme vision of the future, but a possible one)

What Facebook did was shady, but well within the limits of acceptability. Don't expect this to be the last time that Facebook, or other sites try to mislead you. At this point in time, Zukerberg is backed against a wall, pinned down on all sides by investors wondering where their millions are. Do you think they will listen when he tells them the internet doesn't function in the same way as the real world? More than likely, he will try to use what he has to make their millions, and when it comes to Facebook, all he has is what you post.

3 comments:

  1. I'm not a lawyer, but I would think that changing the terms of an agreement after a contract has been signed wouldn't make the new terms effective to those who'd signed before the changing of the terms. If Zuckerberg were really smart about it, he would've tried changing the terms (pulling the quick one), seeing if everything continued flowing smoothly, then making big promises to investors. Although the integrity behind even that more cunning ploy would still be questionable.

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  2. This is very scary. But being one of those who does not read user agreements, I am embarrassed. It really is not surprising that they were able to do this with the number of user agreements that we are told 'read' and agree to on the internet. And how can someone really monitor the internet as it grows every day? In order to be responsible Facebook users, we need to watch what we post and understand what our future may hold, and how your Facebook might affect that.

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  3. I agree with Pot of Gold and Rand Review when I say that Zuckerberg is not bright and the result of this makes us open our eyes to what we can be fooled into when working on the web. In situations like opening up a facebook, myspace, twitter account we figure that if everyone else has done it then it can't be that bad. We figure that because it's received such insane publicity that the company would not want to defame its product. As you said: wrong.

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