Vote : Facebook U-turn on privacy changes

[Al-khiyal]

Facebook aims to market its user data bank to businesses

February 1, 2009 -- Facebook intends to capitalise on the wealth of information it has about its users by offering its 150 million-strong customer base to corporations as a market research tool. The appearance, later this year, of corporate polls targeted at certain parts of the Facebook audience because of the information they have posted on their pages, is likely to infuriate privacy campaigners.

Last week Mark Zuckerberg, the company's 24-year-old founder and chief executive, showed the audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos how the social networking site could be used to poll specific groups of users.

He asked users in Palestine and then Israel about peace issues before relaying the results back to the audience within minutes. He also polled more than 100,000 American users of the website, asking them whether they thought President Obama's fiscal stimulus package would be enough to resurrect the economy. Two out of five said it was not enough.

Giving consumer brands the chance to use such a wide audience to get a quick response to targeted questions would do away with, or at least reduce their reliance on, expensive and time-consuming focus groups.

Speaking to well known tech blogger Robert Scoble at the event, Zuckerberg said 2009 will be Facebook's "intense" year as it tries to justify some of the mammoth valuations that have been placed upon it by making some serious revenues through advertising. He was even seen sporting a tie, a sartorial extra which the Harvard drop-out has so far eschewed.

He added the company has been experimenting with analysis of user sentiment, tracking the mood of its audience through what they are doing online. Such information is potentially very interesting to large brands, which are always seeking to measure what their customers think about their own or competitors' products.

Facebook's advertising technology already allows advertisers to choose which sort of customer will see their *display adverts when they log on to the site. Advertisers can choose from such *categories as where the user is located and their age and gender, based upon what the user has uploaded on to Facebook – which is adding about 450,000 new users a day.

Last year, Facebook launched its Engagement Ads tool, which allows advertisers to publish a poll on people's home pages. They are then able to see how their friends and other Facebook users have voted. The polls, which can include actions such as watching and rating a movie trailer, are being tested by companies including AT&T and CareerBuilder.com.

The American recruitment website tonight used its trial Facebook polls to ask people what they thought of the advert that was played during the coverage of the 43rd Super Bowl. The first widespread use of polls is expected in the spring.

Facebook also has a tool called Facebook Lexicon, which is a bit like Google Trends, in that it allows users to track what topics are being discussed by people on Facebook. While Google Trends uses the search terms that are entered into its site, Facebook Lexicon looks at one of the most visible parts of a user's profile page – their wall, where people and their friends exchange public messages. It provides a searchable database of trends over time, showing how the incidence of particular words or phrases has increased or decreased in wall posts.

Facebook Lexicon shows that the company already has a significant database of user information which it could exploit and the tools are in place to allow companies to use its information for market research purposes.

[Al-khiyal]

Facebook U-turn on privacy changes

February 18, 2009 -- Facebook has backed down on controversial changes to its terms of service that angered users and caused protests across the social networking site.

Two weeks ago the site altered its terms of service so that it continued to retain a copy of all a user's messages, actions and updates – even if they left the network. Until the change, Facebook's policy was to delete all traces of a user if they chose to quit the site.

After the potential scope of the new legal wording became clear, thousands of outraged Facebook users and privacy campaigners lobbied for the world's largest social network to revert to its old terms of service.

On Monday it seemed these calls were falling on deaf ears after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg defended the changes in a blogpost, and suggested that users should trust the site with their data.

However, just 24 hours later the company decided to back down. In a message to users last night, Facebook said it would be reverting to its previous terms and conditions for the time being.

"Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago," the site told users. "Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised."

However, with Facebook's record of backing down on controversial changes before re-implementing them at a later date, privacy campaigners will be keeping a sharp eye on the company's moves.

In 2006 the site introduced its news feed – updates of activities shared between friends on the site. At first the change caused a major row, with users saying it was badly implemented and a gross invasion of their rights. However, after substantial tweaking took place and new controls were added, the news feed was reintroduced and is now considered the central selling point of the site.

The decision to revert to the old legal terms of use is the latest in a string of bad news for Facebook, which recently overtook MySpace as the world's most popular social network and now boasts more than 175 million users worldwide.

Last week it was revealed that the site had paid up to $65 million (£46 million) to settle a court case claiming that Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for Facebook from friends at Harvard.

Information from previous court documents also showed that the company valued itself at $3.7 billion – substantially lower than the $15 billion estimated when Microsoft bought a 1.6% stake for $240 million in 2007.

[Al-khiyal]

Facebook opens up with 'bill of rights'

February 26, 2009 -- Faced with a user revolt over changes to its terms of service, social networking Facebook has decided to take the nuclear option: open itself up to public scrutiny.

In future, the site has announced, proposals to change its terms of service will be circulated to users in order to get feedback. Some may go to a public vote, while it also said that its legal contract with Facebook addicts will be simplified into a "bill of rights and responsibilities".

The document, said founder Mark Zuckerberg, is "not just what people must do when they're on the site… it's also what Facebook must do."

"We're going to notify everyone who wants to be notified and give them time to comment," he said in a call with journalists earlier.

In the case that a proposed change draws a high volume of response, "we'll even put it up for a vote".

The move comes just a few days after an embarrassing climbdown, after changes to the site's terms of use led to outrage among many of the site's 175m users. The concerns, over a shift in wording that appeared to give Facebook perpetual ownership to every piece of data on the site, eventually led to Zuckerberg making a drastic U-turn.

Although executives at the site said they did not intend to offend or annoy users with the earlier changes, they recognised that data ownership was a sensitive issue for many people.

Facebook's vice president of communications and public policy, Eliot Schrage, said it was ironic that many of the blogs which criticised Facebook's recent changes had even more.

"Because of the nature of the information our users share, we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard," he added.

Facebook has suffered from backlashes after before – when implementing its news feed or its controversial Beacon advertising system, for example. But this latest change effectively hopes to stem future controversies in the bud by putting part of the company's up for public approval (although Facebook will, of course, still control which issues are up for public discussion and vote)

Zuckerberg, who seemed stuck for words on a few occasions, said that although the announcement was precipitated by last week's farce, the changes had been discussed for a "long time".

[amalgamate]

Two weeks ago the site altered its terms of service so that it continued to retain a copy of all a user's messages, actions and updates – even if they left the network. Until the change, Facebook's policy was to delete all traces of a user if they chose to quit the site.

ummm... imagine others watching your every move

ekkhhssss

glad they've bailed out on that policy

[Al-khiyal]

Facebook users voting on new terms of service

April 22, 2009 -- Facebook is waiting to see the results of its experiment in user democracy: Six days ago, it invited its users to vote for or against two documents governing how the popular social-networking site operates, and the balloting ends at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time tomorrow.

I pretty much told Facebook to do this in a column written after a revision to its terms of service set off what passes for civic unrest on the site. So I was glad to see this election happen and was pleased to cast my own vote earlier today.

(The usual disclaimers apply: Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham sits on Facebook's board of directors; Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly is a friend from college.)

Not to strip away every bit of mystery about my vote, but I am also pleased with the substance of those two documents (each available in French, Italian, German and Spanish translations).

One, the "Facebook Principles" sets out the broad goals the site aims to accomplish - things like "Freedom to Share and Connect" and "Open Platforms and Standards." It's supposed to be the rhetorical foundation of any specific policies

The other one, Facebook's "Statement of Rights and Responsibilities" sets out those policies - and, compared to most terms-of-service documents, does so in uncommonly clear language. For example, its section on what Facebook can do with the things you write, post or upload on the site begins with a simple statement:

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how we share your content through your privacy and application settings.

It then explains that you have to give Facebook permission to publish your intellectual property ("IP" for short) to your friends, then says that Facebook's rights to your stuff end when you delete your account:

This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account (except to the extent your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it).

It's not quite written in grade-school English, but it doesn't lodge in your throat like unchewed legalese anymore.

Two other notes posted on the Facebook Site Governance page list Facebook's responses to comments about these two documents. You can consider them the rough equivalent of a programmer's comments in an application's source code or the legislative history of a bill - not legally binding, but useful in interpreting these rules.

The note about the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities is particularly enlightening. It clears up such mysteries as why Facebook demands that you update your mobile-phone number within 48 hours of changing it ("we settled a class action brought by people getting charged for text messages intended for Facebook users"). It also clarifies the Statement's prohibition against using Facebook's "copyrights or trademarks (including Facebook, the Facebook and F Logos, FB, Face, Poke, Wall and 32665) without our written permission":

What we mean here is that you may not use any of these words in a way that infringes our trademark rights. But it does not prevent you from making a nominative or fair use of those words, like telling people "I have an account on Facebook."

Of course, that's the sort of thing that should be spelled out in the Statement itself. And had I gotten off my duff and read these documents during their drafting phase, I would have posted a comment saying exactly that. Instead, I neglected to follow this process for the wrong few weeks.

For that matter, I don't remember taking any note of the Facebook home page's reminder to "Vote on Facebook's Governing Documents" for the first few days it appeared - unless it did, in fact, only show up today. Have others been following things more closely than I have? After I voted, Facebook's site informed me that 377,036 users had cast a ballot. (It also listed the current vote totals, but it doesn't seem quite fair to throw those numbers out here.) Thing is, Facebook now has some 200 million total. So unless there's some last-minute surge in voting, we're looking at pretty low turnout compared to even the most consequence-free real-world election.

If you're a Facebook user, have you voted? Why or why not?

[Al-khiyal]

Facebook to give users greater control of personal data after vote

April 24, 2009 -- Facebook will change its terms of use to give users greater control over their personal data following a vote, it has been announced. The website sparked fierce criticism in February when terms and conditions were changed and appeared to give the site ownership of personal data, including pictures, video and profile information - even after users deleted their accounts.

After consulting users, the social networking site held a week-long vote on whether to adopt a new set of terms and principles which state that people should own their own information and be able to remove it from the service. Founder Mark Zuckerberg said the site aimed to adopt a more "transparent and democratic approach".

More than 600,000 users took part in the vote, with 75 per cent opting for the revised documents.

Facebook's chief lawyer Ted Ullyot wrote on the site's blog on Friday: "We're pleased that users supported the proposed documents and validated our efforts to respond to their concerns. You can expect to see the new documents on the site in the coming weeks. After that, all future proposed changes to the Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities will be subject to the notice, comment and voting provisions of the documents."

Mr Zuckerberg had said the vote would only be binding if 30% of the site's 200 million users took part. But Mr Ullyot said Facebook would still go ahead with the changes and the threshold for future votes was likely to be revised.