Lawyers urge Facebook users to remain on guard

Facebook has admitted that the new terms were introduced without full consideration

Facebook has sparked a widespread debate about the importance of copyright clauses in social networking sites' terms of service, after an update on 4 February meant that it would no longer relinquish control over content when users ended their contracts with the firm.

After thousands of protests, Facebook announced on Wednesday that it would revert to the old conditions of service. But lawyers warned that Facebook's move should not be forgotten so quickly, particularly as the company intends to draw up new terms and conditions soon.

"I would be very worried if I was a Facebook user. Whatever they changed the conditions for, they grabbed more rights than they needed to," said Susan Hall, an ICT and media partner at law firm Cobbetts.

Facebook is now attempting to regain the trust of its users. Barry Schnitt, manager of corporate communications and public policy at the firm, admitted to a protest group called 'Facebook Owns You' that the new terms were introduced without full consideration.

"We realised that the new version of the terms might technically permit some of the hypothetical situations people have offered," he explained.

"I can assure you, however, that these hypotheticals are not ones we had in mind when writing the terms, and that selling user information for profit, or using it to advertise Facebook in some way, was never part of our original intent."

But Cobbetts' Hall insisted that a global organisation like Facebook, which has more than 150 million users, should have considered the implications of the new terms before their introduction, and that a key component when drawing up copyright legislation is considering the hypothetical.

People often post media content on a social networking site as a convenient way to share experiences, but they may not be aware of the value of the content at the time, she explained.

Hall came up with a few hypothetical situations of her own. "What if you were like the chap in Dallas in 1963 who took footage of the Kennedy assassination? He may not have realised it at the time, but what he captured was priceless," she said.

Other examples of valuable content on Facebook include postings during the tsunami, the July 2007 London bombings and Hurricane Katrina. Hall warned that social networkers should rethink what kind of data they upload to sites such as Facebook. "There is an interesting division between people's anxiety over their data, and the freedom with which they throw it into the public domain," she said.

The Facebook change at the beginning of February was "opportunistic", Hall concluded. "They could have just changed the conditions to include a clause informing users that information posted to third parties will not be deleted when accounts are terminated, but that all other content will remain under the user's control," she said.

Meanwhile, Alex Brown, a data protection partner at law firm Simmons & Simmons, was more concerned over the inconsistency of Facebook's actions. "Facebook should not be collecting information in one way and then using it in another," he said.

Brown pointed out that Facebook is likely to need hugely improved technology if it wants to store data indefinitely. "If they change the system to use data in a different way, issuing statements after the event is rather unhelpful," he said.

Facebook's reversion to its old terms of service marks the first time that the site has acted on user concerns, having previously refused to adapt after receiving more than 2.6 million complaints about the new layout of the site.

More than 20,000 users had joined Facebook protest groups to vent their anger at the changes to the terms and conditions, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center planned to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has now said that the next revision of its terms of service will be "substantial", and that users will be offered a chance to have their say.

"It will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we'll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms," he said.

"You have my commitment that we'll do all of these things, but in order to do them right it will take a little bit of time. We expect to complete this in the next few weeks."