Facebook Responds to TOS Outrage Sort of

Yesterday we reported that Facebook, the social network with 175 million active users and growing, had updated their Terms of Service (TOS) to state that they own your data now and forever. The new verbiage added to the Facebook TOS gives them full rights to any data you upload to the site, even if you were to close down your account.

Today, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook stated on the company's blog that "Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they've asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn't help people share that information."

His response to owning the data forever? He states "When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear."

I think the Facebook TOS is anything BUT clear. It would take a team of lawyers hours to decipher the TOS and even then, I'm not so sure it would be understood much by you or me. From what I have read of it and the blog post written on Facebook, the question I previously asked remains - What if you were a user who signed up under the original TOS, are you bound to it and can you opt-out of the new TOS by closing your account and having all of your data not legally owned by Facebook? Surely there is a loophole there, or Facebook wouldn't have "updated (their) terms.. to make (it) more clear." as they wrote in the company blog.