Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has told his company's 175 million users that the recent changes his company has made to its terms of use have not been implemented for nefarious purposes.
A contentious clause in the social networking site's recently-amended terms of use has raised the ire of some Facebook users. It reads as follows:
"You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to 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..."
The new terms of use, which were posted to Facebook on February 4, give the social networking site the right to hang onto information posted by users for as long as the site wants -- and even after that information is removed from a user's profile.
Privacy lawyer Brian Bowman told CTV Edmonton that some users may want to consider using Canadian-owned social networking sites that must adhere to stricter privacy laws.
"You're probably going to be afforded much better privacy protection in Canada than you will in other countries, such as the United States," he said.
Zuckerberg, in a post published on The Facebook Blog on Monday, explained why the company made the changes it did.
He said the company changed the language of its terms of use because it better described the way the site works.
"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," Zuckerberg said on The Facebook Blog.
"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."
"In reality," Zuckerberg continued in his posting, "we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work."
Zuckerberg said that people want full ownership and control of access to their information, while demanding full access to information that has been passed to them by others, such as email addresses, phone numbers, and the like.
"These two positions are at odds with each other," Zuckerberg said in his posting. "There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with."
The Facebook founder said his site's users that the contextual issues of privacy and information exchange on the Internet are complex and are constantly "being worked out."
Zuckerberg said these issues form "difficult terrain to navigate," but he pledged his company would make efforts to "resolve them very seriously" as they arise in future.
