So, every tech news blog and website on the planet was shocked and amazed that Facebook decided to change it’s terms and conditions, so it had the right to use / keep / eat all it’s users information. I am genuinely stunned that so many tech ‘insiders’ and social media experts are so freaking stunned at what Facebook has done. Why?
That’s what people like Facebook do!
Remember when Google Chrome was released? Their original terms include YOU giving Google:
“a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”
Facebook provides a ‘free’ platform in return for which, they want to monetize everything they possibly can – including YOUR stuff. It’s their platform, their servers, their tech support team (and their lawyers.)
Facebook and WordPress.com
Look at WordPress.com. They plant covert adverts into the blog pages of their users blogs, which the blog’s owner is barred from seeing! The advert can be for anything and the blog’s owner has no control. The only way to remove this threat is to pay a fee to have these secret ads removed! This move was hardly reported on by WordPress’s ‘friends,’ (which is most of the tech news industry!)
Bottom line, if your stuff is that important, don’t share it all on someone else’s free to use service! Even if the terms of service TODAY seem totally reasonable, as Facebook and WordPress.com’s bullshit has shown, they will change them AFTER the event anyway.
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the fact that Facebook change their TOS back so quickly is an indication that they knew they were wrong in the first place