Dear Friend and Reader,
While in Dublin over Christmas, I popped into the Lighthouse Cinema, a gorgeous new independent theater, to watch Etz Limon (Lemon Tree): a film about the Israel-Palestine conflict, shot through the perspective of two middle-aged women. In one scene, the wife of an Israeli politician divulged Palestinian sympathies to her best friend, who also happens to be a reporter. The next day, the wife’s opinion was all over the news.
Living in the Internet age is like having a best friend who’s a reporter, and if you are part of a social networking site like Facebook, your best friend really is a reporter.
Every photograph that’s taken, every place you go with someone is a potential news headline in the life of you and those around you.
On Feb. 15, news broke that Facebook made an attempt to hang onto your information for itself by changing its terms of use agreement. The Consumerist, a blog whose parent company also publishes Consumer Report, broke the story. Based on your privacy settings, Facebook has control over the information you publish on your page, and can reuse it whenever and however it sees fit, including articles that are posted as links from other websites. This would mean that Facebook has the right to reuse and manipulate this article you’re reading right now, because I posted it on my Facebook page.
What changed in the new Terms of Service agreement was what happens when you delete your page: previously, your content went with it. In the new Terms, Facebook got to keep your info.В Eric has likened this to Ice-nine, the chemical referenced in Kurt Vonnegut’sВ Cat’s Cradle.В Everything Ice-nine touched became Ice-nine, and everything Facebook hosts becomes Facebook.
There was massive public outcry over this, and three days laterВ they went back to their old termsВ and claimed sloppy contract writing as the reason for this near-massive infringement on our privacy and ownership rights.