Facebook drops the ball.

Very recently Facebook has come under fire. According to CNN, member backlash against Facebook began over the weekend after a consumer advocate Web site, The Consumerist, flagged a change made to Facebook’s policy earlier in the month.

Normally I would just chalk this up as standard corporate diligence-gone-overkill in the manner of so many other online services who are dependent on advertisement, and demographic statistics analysis for market firms….but this goes WAY beyond. This is an attempt to have free reign on even syndicated material. That’s right…even RSS/Atom feeds pumped into the site would be subject to these terms…which is why FB requires any RSS you import to be yours, so there aren’t any infringement issues with FB’s content policies. Anyhow, bottom line, it’s a trashy move and I am fully against it.

So what should we do? Personally I love the idea of a public forum where people can share themselves in a tasteful manner.
But then it becomes a business, is exploited for money, and corporate data mining and stunts in legalese clear a path for unnecessary publishing and usage rights to material that is in no manner owned by the business. Sure it could have been done if it had been thought of as a baseline policy…but this late in the game…bad for positive image. All this does is tell someone they have a chance to make things right by creating a competing social networking venue.

Here are some links.
The Consumerist
CNN
USA Today

Most importantly,a Facebook Group has done a very good job of making very clear all the problems within Facebook’s Terms Of Use changes.
People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)

The Suggestion area for Facebook’s Terms Of Use.
Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities