Background
I’m sure most have read news stories or heard reports on facebook’s privacy (and other) concerns. There are numerous postings from credible sources online about these issues (re: Why Facebook is Bad, Facebooks New Privacy Changes, Just How Bad is Facebook’s App Privacy Problem?). Most issues revolve around Facebook sharing all of your information with its application providers (e.g. farmville, mafiawars, etc.). I’m not overly concerned with this issue as I use no apps on Facebook; however, this is not the biggest problem I have with Facebook.
Details
Did you realize that you grant Facebook (and anyone it wishes to grant) a royalty-free, worldwide license to sell or redistribute your information (e.g. photos, videos, etc.)? Most people see this and think nothing of it but I suggest you dig deeper. This means that if you take a cute picture of your daughter or a beautiful picture of a sunset over a mountain Facebook can resell that picture or redistribute it as there own. This still may not sound too bad to you but imagine if that cute picture of your daughter is so cute that Facebook decides they want to use it as a Facebook promo to promote how cute and cuddly Facebook is…well they can do it without asking or paying you anything. Needless to say your daughters picture will now be seen by hundreds of millions of Facebook users whether you like it or not. Per the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities “For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.” - rield.com (this is a good article, I’d definitely suggest reading it).
In the end it is your decision to use Facebook and what information you wish to share on it. If you do use it, please do so cautiously and read all Terms of Service and Privacy statements as they will probably surprise you. Most technical experts recommend staying away from Facebook or at the least using it in an very limited fashion. I would have to agree with the view due to Facebook’s privacy and data sharing policies as well as Facebook’s unwavering quest to get more users at any cost in order to inflate the company’s worth when going public.
Alternatives
There are several alternatives, most (that are large and/or growing) have similar issues with privacy and data sharing. A quick list of alternatives:
- Myspace - a predecessor to facebook which most know about
- Hi5 - similar to facebook / myspace
- Wikipedias List of Social Websites - a list of social websites from wikipedia
- Diaspora - a decentralized social website (also see wikipedia’s entry on diaspora)
I would highly recommend staying tuned to Diaspora as it solves a lot of facebook (and other social websites) issues by allowing the user (you) to control your data and its location.
