The Daily Habit: Technology
Trolling for Souls on Facebook- “Hi. My name is Armand and I’m a rich, hairy chested man from Syria. I have a tank, two nuclear missiles and a fleet of oil trucks at my disposal. In my spare time I like to pillage small towns in Pakistan, race camels on weekends, and sleep nude in the desert. If you want to get together for some terrorism or some casual patriarchy, call me at 555-555-5555. If you don’t have a satelite phone you can use my credit card to buy some pre-paid minutes. My card number is abcdefg123.” If you have a Facebook account and your profile looks something like this, you’re never going to pick up women. Even worse, you just sold your soul to those data mining pricks at Facebook, even if you gave up fishing the personals a long time ago.
More than 38,000 Facebook users have joined a user group protesting the change, and countless blogs and news sites have written about their concerns. The issue comes down to a couple of alterations within the company’s terms of use that, it would seem, give Facebook eternal ownership of your personal content, even if you decide to delete your account. The section in question explains how Facebook has an “irrevocable, perpetual” license to use your “name, likeness, and image” in essentially any way, including within promotions or external advertising. That clause, wasn’t new. What had changed was that a sentence at the end of the paragraph was now mysteriously missing. The deleted stated that the license would “automatically expire” if you removed your content. With that line omitted, Facebook’s license to use your content is simply “perpetual” and “irrevocable,” even decades after you delete your stuff” (http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/facebookprivacychangesparksfederalcomplaint).
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has attempted to squash concerns by posting a statement stating that “people own their information” and that Facebook “wouldn’t share [it] in a way you wouldn’t want.” As an example of why the controversial clause is needed in its updated form, Zuckerberg explains that even if you were to delete your account, any messages you had sent to a friend would still remain in his inbox, so Facebook requires the expanded rights to make sure that could happen.
Sure they do. They want to own every aspect of ill-informed clients, even after they’ve grown up and moved on to MySpace and SwappingPartners.com. There are enough perverts and pedafiles lurking on Facebook, not to mention those jackals who are sellling cars in New Jersey from a remote site in Nigeria, so why should neurotics have to worry about having their info and likenesses stolen? If they wanted to fall victim of internet crimes they could just get an Ebay account like everyone else. Do yourself a favor. Ban Facebook before they steel your soul.
