I wanted to try a series that simplifies the news - cuts through big articles with boring facts and interviews and shit and just tells you what the story is about. Simple.

The backlash against Facebook's rampant abuse of privacy is gaining ground. 15 consumer watchdog groups have filed complaints with the American FTC over their more recent abuses.

Lebanon holding up peace talks with Israel by stating that they won't tell Hezbollah(a militia turned political entity) to disarm until the country has decided on a defence strategy to integrate Hezbollah's weapons into the regular army.

Pakistan tests a couple of nuclear bombs saying they want recognition from the world for being a legitimate nuclear power.

Lithuanian court this week banned the gay pride parade in the name of Jesus. The ruling was later overturned by an appeals court in the name of justice and freedom.

The Pope fired a leading German bishop for allegedly physically and sexually abusing children, and financially misconducting.

In Afghanistan the now unanimously unwelcome violent extremist group, the Taliban, is upset that the Afghan president is visiting Washington. The group has announced that they will be launching a fresh violent campaign starting on Monday, planning to "Lay siege to the cities".

Protestors in Thailand becoming violent; using drive-by shootings, grenades, in an effort to encourage peace in the country and to keep busy while a rough peace draft is being written up. The draft is due by the 15th.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have found a way to better predict how genes will behave in different types of human tissue. The same gene does different things in different places in the body. This discovery decodes those different things for any given gene.

Scientists have created a material that mimics the physical properties of muscle tissue. No one's sure what to do with it yet.

Nokia (The world's biggest mobile phone company) is suing Apple, saying the iPhone infringes on 5 of Nokia's patents. It's not the first time. Apple is counter suing saying Nokia infringes on their patents.

A few days ago Greek protestors were upset with the government and economy, so they set fire to a bank killing 3 people.

Editorial Section:

Perhaps the most important news of the day, this dog smiled so much she almost fell over.

Feel free to skip down to The Good Stuff.

And when you're done here think about reading about the Boycott Facebook movement.

I left Facebook more than a year ago and it went like this. Unfortunately the final straw causing me to want to finally leave, was the same reason I couldn't. Deleting my Facebook account on that day under that TOS(Terms of Service) would mean Facebook had the right to use my identity, content, and likeness forever, in any context, for any reason. So I deleted all my content on Facebook instead, changed my profile to explain to all my friends what a giant scam and shady organization Facebook was. I hoped and waited for the day that Facebook changed their TOS to back to something less permanent, or at least forgot my old profile data/content.. which was unlikely to happen. The next day a few Facebook groups had already sprung up outraged at the new TOS and petitioning to reverse the horrific changes, they were all rapidly growing in support and I had a little hope.

A few days later Facebook responded, and temporarily reversed the changes to their TOS while they, to paraphrase, worked with users on a Facebook Bill of Rights. While the old TOS was still shady and demented the permanent ownership of YOU and right to sell/share YOU with any 3rd party(multi-teared) for any reason was lifted. Realizing Facebook's Bill of Rights Bologne was an obvious sham I deleted my account as fast as I could.

I've spent the last year trying to explain to people what a nightmare Facebook is, and what they're becoming - and not only was I right about the direction they were going in, but nobody listened or cared about (see: Understood) a word I was saying. It was a hard lesson in the profound stupidity of the end-user. You're all just chimps in human clothing.

The Good Stuff - 15 Good Reasons to Ditch Facebook

1. Ever Changing Terms

Every time Facebook updates their TOS - which is quite often, it becomes more frightening, harder to leave Facebook, Facebook's rights to your identity, and right to share your private personal messages, images, and everything you put on Facebook get's more invasive and pervasive.

2. Auto-Resetting Privacy Controls

With every TOS update they kindly reset all your "privacy" controls to public for you, and it remains as such until you manually set it back to your preferred level of privacy.

You're required to race to Facebook when this happens and change them back before your parents and boss see the photos from that crazy kegger you were at last weekend, and before Google indexes your now public life letting it show up in people's Google searches.

3. Confusingly Complex Privacy Controls

Facebook's privacy controls are far too complex and convoluted for anyone to understand, and require an afternoon just to configure all of them. There's absolutely no reason for this other than to coax people into not setting them.

4. Irrelevant Privacy Controls

Facebook's privacy controls are irrelevant because the Facebook TOS allows Facebook to share all your activity and content with anyone in the world, regardless of your privacy settings. It doesn't matter if your boss can't log into Facebook and see embarrassing photos of you, when your boss can just call Facebook and ask them to send over all the photos you've ever posted, even private ones, even ones your friends posted and tagged you in.

5. Facebook Applications Can See Everything

Before I left Facebook I had made a small Facebook application. While I never used it for this purpose it shocked me to find out that even back then I, a 3rd party developer who had to provide no ID of any kind to Facebook, could access ALL OF THE PRIVATE INFORMATION AND CONTENT of anyone that added my application to their profile and ALL OF THEIR FRIENDS', AND FRIENDS OF FRIENDS' PRIVATE INFORMATION AND CONTENT. I could access everything, and I could do whatever I wanted with that information. I could visit your mother's house and hand her a printed out copy of an embarrassing photo of you. I could start a website where I just published all your personal information.

6. The new Facebook API - Social Graph

An API is when a website let's 3rd party programmers access their content from their 3rd party website or app. So the Twitter API let's TweetDeck login to Twitter for you and fetch your friends/updates/etc. so that you can see and interact with Twitter in TweetDeck.

At their recent developer conference, Facebook unveiled their new API which is currently available for use. It let's any website log into your Facebook and is Opt-Out. Which means you have to deliberately decide not to use it.

Every porn site, joke site, self-help site will soon have a small chunk of code added which automatically logs you into your Facebook account and gives the random site near total control of your Facebook profile.

Which means not only does ilikedonkeyshahahowdoistop.com know exactly who you are, who your friends are, and who their friends are, can post to your wall which videos you're watching, questions you're asking, pictures you're looking at. They can also create a Facebook group and make you a member of it, they can email your mother and tell her what you did on their site, they can Facebook message all your Friends and tell them how much you love their unique brand of porn, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Aside from ilikedonkeyshahahowdoistop.com being able to know and do all that and more without any real consent(that's now, soon you won't have to give any consent), Facebook also has all this data. Facebook knows your browsing habits, they know the content of every page you visit. EVEN if there's a mild warning that says "Would you like to let this site use your Facebook?" which there are many ways for the shady site to hide and obfuscate, even if you see that warning and click "No", that Alert/question comes from Facebook who knows exactly where you are on the web, exactly what the content of the page you're on is and can watch what you're doing there. So even if you stay on top of every setting Facebook gives you and opt out of everything, Facebook still knows everything you do on the internet and can and will share that information to ANYONE THEY WANT, ANY TIME IN THE FUTURE, and the 3rd parties they share it with are also allowed to share the data with anyone they want forever.

7. Beacon

Beacon was an ad program a while back, that sort of came back on and off, where Facebook would advertise to your friends - without your consent - in your name. For example, Facebook could show your friend Jenny a message saying that "you really like Bacon Slather -a revolutionary new product where you bath in grease, and that last Tuesday when you used it, you had an orgasm and called out her name." They would be able to do this, and did, regardless of whether you had even heard of Bacon Slather.

They would also turn things you did actually post into an ad. So if you posted an status update saying "Fred is a total douche" Facebook would not only be able to re-word your update, but they would turn the word douche into a link that took any of your friends who clicked on it to a porn site specializing in videos of women douching. The new Facebook API is the latest evolution of Beacon.

8. Facebook's Revenue

Facebook makes money, and is setting up greater infrastructure to make money, by selling your private(regardless of privacy settings) information and content to anyone who'll buy it (advertisers, scammers, spammers, the government, the media, a thief, a murderer, your mother, your boss, anyone). Putting anything on Facebook gives Facebook the right to do that forever, so don't think about changing your mind 5, 10, or 5000 years down the line. They keep everything you've ever posted.

9. Facebook Intends to be a Publicly Traded Company (as in the stock market)

Aside from the manipulative, convoluted and outright morally wrong behaviour Facebook has and continues to exhibit in the name of exploiting its users for profit. When they go public they will have a legal obligation to its shareholders to maximize profit. Everything bad about Facebook has increased in severity by a factor of 10 since I left a year ago, and will drastically increase as they move towards and begin offering their first stocks.

10. Facebook Continues to Exploit You After You Die

Usually when a person dies, their bereaved family sends proof of your death to the various websites you belonged to so that they delete your account, and/or let your family save some of the pictures and memories you stored in the cloud.

When Facebook get's someone's death certificate the first thing they do is lock the deceased person's account. So even if your husband/girlfiend/whatever knows your password and wants to delete your Facebook profile, they're blocked from logging in. Then the account is given special dead person status, so every one of the dead person's Facebook Friends now knows they're dead. In addition and perhaps most shocking, Facebook then lets any of the dead person's Facebook friends - regardless of privacy settings - comment on the dead person's wall and photos. Often your Facebook friends are not people you really know, friends of friends and complete strangers. There is no way for the grieving family to remove, edit, or otherwise hide obsene, disgusting, and offensive comments, photos, and links posted to the dead person's wall. They just have to watch as the memory of their loved one is tainted and destroyed - and public.

Facebook will keep a dead person's profile in this locked down public state for about 60 days after the last person visits the page. Because every visit is a chance for you to click on one of the diet ads on the side. So 60 days after everyone forget's about your dead loved one Facebook will take the page down because it no longer generates profit for them.

11. Facebook is You

When you use Facebook, you agree to give them equal rights to your identity and likeness. One of the sick things they do with those rights is take control of your Profile.

Recently they began perpetuating people's profiles after they delete their Facebook account. So you decide you want to leave Facebook today, you delete your account, but your friends can still invite you to events, send you friend requests and pokes, and tag you in photos. Searching for your Facebook account still turns it up - like you never left.

So deleting your profile and canceling your Facebook account doesn't actually do that, instead what you're doing is going from joint ownership and control of your Facebook account and profile, to giving Facebook complete control.

It's only a matter of time before Facebook uses your "deleted" account to carry on conversations with your friends in your name, and resurrects random historical profile data, or simply generates new information based on what you've typed in before to make it look like you're still on Facebook.

If you delete your Facebook account today, you may get a phone call next week from your friend Jenny wondering why you told her you hate her and why you posted a photoshopped image of her profile picture were you replaced her head with a cow's. You'll try explain to her that Facebook is now controlling your profile and it was them and not you, but she won't believe you and you'll have to join Facebook again just so that you can jointly control your profile with Facebook and be dragged back into the site again.

This also means that some of the people you're interacting with on Facebook - or stalking - aren't really them. It's just Facebook pretending to be them, not that such a thing makes your Facebook relationships any more hollow.

12. Facebook is Inherently Insecure

As I explained here aside from the myriad of reasons Facebook is insecure, it contains a very public (regardless of "privacy" settings) list of all your social connections, where you go, and what you do. This information is now being used by spammers and hackers to manipulate you into opening virus laden emails you normally wouldn't by posing as your friends and sending you links to viruses that can't be detected by anti-virus software that's in a social context which you trust. They're scamming people out of money, pretending to be a friend stuck in another country who just needs $900 to get home where they'll pay you back. And also as a resource for answering your secret questions. A lot of sites, including some banks and email providers, let you pick a secret question and answer in the event you forget and/or need to reset your password. One look at your Facebook data and anyone can reset your accounts locking you out and letting them in.

13. Tech People in the Media are Leaving Facebook

The people that stand to lose the most from leaving a social network are finally pulling the plug. These are people that live in the public eye, so they're a lot more comfortable with Facebook's loose privacy, and their leaving Facebook affects their fan base who friended them on the network. About a week ago Leo Laporte deleted his Facebook account citing impossible to understand privacy settings, and the lack of ethics of the company. Leo Laporte for those who don't know is a tech god and hugely trusting, when he has a beef with something or someone it's so justified you'd have to be a turnip not to follow suit.

14. South Park

South Park and other comedy shows are starting to point out the hilarity of Facebook's TOS and "privacy" settings.

15. None of This is a Surprise

Facebook's founder and creator Mark Zuckerberg stole much of the code, and concept for Facebook from his school friends before he dropped out. They sued him and because Facebook was taking off he was able to settle out of court. He has a history of unethical behaviour, so it's no surprise his creation operates in a completely unethical malicious way.

What Do We Do Now?

First of all stop using Facebook immediately. Don't post another real status update, picture, comment, nothing.

Quite frankly unless you live in a country that enforces your rights and freedoms on the internet, of privacy, and prevents you from being obligated to unreasonable contracts you're totally and royally fucked, and next time maybe listen to me when I tell you bad things are coming.

If you're lucky enough to live in such a country first remove all your Facebook content and data, set all your privacy settings to the maximum privacy (to show intent in case you have to prove in court one day you wanted private) then completely delete and remove your Facebook account and profile. This is an intentionally long, confusing, misleading process and one more way Facebook has decided to abuse you. Document the process with screenshots, and email yourself the evidence so it's timestamped.

If you live in a country that doesn't care that you foolishly sold your soul to the devil, or the above doesn't work and you find your profile is still active and interacting with its Facebook friends without you, you'll need to opt for plan B.

Plan B involves keeping, or reactivating your Facebook account, making sure the only content associated with your account is about what an evil entity Facebook is, and have your "privacy" settings set to public. The best thing you can do in that situation is help create awareness and spread the word. Friend people on Facebook, and friend them with a message about why you're not able to delete your account. Start and join groups about it. Get the word out.

If enough people do this they may temporarily change their TOS to reflect a non-permanent contract which will allow you to actually delete your profile instead of just giving Facebook full control over it.

I've talked a lot about their unpleasantly ghostly Privacy Policy and Myspace-esk TOS, you know the ones that sign away equal rights and entitlement to your identity indefinitely just by using their site. But I haven't talked about the intrinsic insecurity of a social network like Facebook.

Fact: A significant amount of computer users exhibit insecure behaviour online. They don't use strong passwords, they don't opt for https://, they don't work on virus/keylogger free computers, and they answer spam emails(shocking I know).

Fact: Facebook contains not just a list of all your friends, but all your friends' friends, and a record of your interactions with them. Your social network and scene.

Think about it like this: If someone gains access to your email account, they can see your contact list, and they can see how you talk to your contacts. If they have a lot of time on their hands they can read huge volumes of emails and piece together your relationships.

On Facebook, they can see your list of friends, family, your communication with them, but more importantly their communication with each other. A schematic of your social life heavy with descriptions of how you know each person. Assuming you've toggled your privacy settings back so only your friends can see your stuff, and did so before google indexed your profile and friends list. Every one of your Facebook friends is an attack vector for all the personal info you've posted and that your friends and family have posted that doesn't even relate to you. More clearly A is an attack vector for B, A<->B, C, and B<->C.

In addition 3rd party Facebook app developers also have access to your social circle and information. Your Buddy wants to try an app from some developer he doesn't know? Well they just grabbed your entire social network and know a LOT about you and all your friends.

On Facebook, you are not the only one responsible for keeping your information safe. Anyone you friend is. Would you trust your Facebook friends with your Facebook username and password?

It's given birth to a new breed of highly personalized spam. Imagine getting an email from someone you don't know offering you cheap Viagra and even using your first name. Sounds like a scam right? Sounds like if you clicked on the link you'd probably get a virus or some kind of malware installed on your system right? Right.

Now imagine getting an email from Sarah your old girlfriend, where she talks about something you did the other night at a party (which you posted a photo of on Facebook being careful to only let your friends see) and then telling you she wants you to see a funny youtube video. You click on the link and guess what? It wasn't Sarah at all! "What?!", you say? How's that possible?

The Spammer, we'll call him Spammer, gains access to Jim(your buddy)'s Facebook account because a) he accidentally typed in FaceBack.com without realizing it and tried to login. His credentials were phished and the Spammer was in his account within 30 seconds, or b) Jim(same Jim) adds an application where the 3rd party developer wrote a bunch of code that scrapes all of Jim's and your information and emails it to him(the Spammer) as a .zip file when it's done. The Spammer goes ahead and looks through Jim's friends list, then through yours. Looks through your photos and descriptions of each of your contacts. Looks at Sarah's profile and write's down her email address, attaches the photo to an email, the email spoofs Sarah's email address(this is astoundingly easy without her login credentials from any computer connected to the internet) and adds an html link that looks like this in code:

<a href="http://sitewithavirus/silentkeylogger"> http://youtube.com/v=harmlessvideo</a>

and to you looks like this:

http://youtube.com/v=harmlessvideo

Clicking on the link will obviously take you to the virus and not to youtube and if you use Internet Explorer, or the Spammer is using a zero-day exploit for one of the other browsers, you're fucked due to arbitrary code execution.

A site that gives anyone other than you access to a super detailed schematic of your social circle is inherently insecure. Facebook should not expose your real life social circle to anyone even other people in that circle. But they do and will because a large part of their user retention plays on social needs for acceptance/approval/jealousy/etc. which requires exposing that information to people you normally wouldn't and in a permanent public manner that you normally wouldn't.

Some time ago Facebook decided that should they be notified of a user's passing, instead of deleting their profile like other social network sites, they would convert it to a 'memorial page' which was only available to confirmed friends allowing them to post memories and condolences on their profile. On the surface perhaps that seems like a kind act on Facebook's part. But it seems that even if the bereaved family asks Facebook to take the profile down they just don't.

From an ethics standpoint sadly it's starting to become clear that Facebook just has none. From a business standpoint what their doing is taking advantage of the spike in hits to the deceased's profile to boost ad revenue, and finally taking the profile down 4 weeks after the last post when the cost of hosting the profile is more than the ad revenue being generated. Facebook believes they have the right to leach off their users, to own and exploit their identity, even after death. It's not just that they're exploiting the grief of it's users, it's that they're ignoring the grief of family members and facilitating in the possible damaging and tainting of the memory of that person.

The Consumerist posted a letter sent to them by Stephanie Bemister who told her story and how Facebook's greed is affecting her family.

Dear Ben,

It is great that organizations such as yours have such an impact for consumers. Please accept my heartfelt thanks for all you do.

I have a problem which has not been mentioned so far and I have to say I am heartbroken, angry and am lost for words.

My brother, William Bemister, died very suddenly mid November. He lived in Oxford, England. I went to the UK to hold a service for my brother who was divorced and lived on his own. However, if anyone believed he was just another single, and lonely middle-aged man with no friends or family to speak of, this was far from the truth. He was a successful Nazi hunter, Emmy award winning investigative journalist with thousands of contacts all over the world. He was about to start filming his next documentary, 'Admissible Evidence.'

He had a Facebook page. The day before he died he promised me he would accept me on his friends list. We spoke on the phone two, three times a week. And were very close even though thousands of miles apart. Also on his friends list were my two daughters, his nieces. He only knew, personally, three other women, the rest of his friends were strangers he met through Facebook Oxford links.

The dilemma I had was that he had posted a lot of personal information such as phone number, company website, email address. If you have ever lost someone you will appreciate that when someone dies you need to have this information removed quickly for several reasons: for security purposes, to stop strangers incessantly phoning and emailing the deceased and the worst of all, the sheer grief of dealing with hundreds of people who believe he is still alive and need to be informed of his death. It just made sense to remove his membership.

I emailed their 'privacy' division, attached a copy of his death certificate and asked them politely to remove his membership. Facebook refused with the following comment:

"Per our policy for deceased users, we have memorialized this person's account. This removes certain more sensitive information and sets privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or find the person in search. The Wall remains so that friends and family can leave posts in remembrance."

Facebook is the only group social site that has refused to remove his membership. I am sickened by them. My two daughters are heartbroken as his face still remains on their own member's page. They will not delete him off their own pages or we will never know when or how his site will be deleted. There are strangers in his membership list who can write whatever they wish on his Wall and I, his next of kin and sister, cannot even view his page. It is horrible. How can Facebook be so insensitive to the wishes of a deceased member's family? I have never in my life felt so betrayed, angry and sickened.

What do they think they are doing? What if a teen dies for example. Parents are rarely invited onto their child's friends' list. Can you imagine what a parent would feel if they received such an inexplicable email from this company?

I have spoken to a number of advocate groups. They all say the same thing. They have never heard of such a thing, think it's disgraceful and suggest I would probably have more luck writing to Mark Zuckerberg a personal letter. If this issue is not common now, it will become a serious problem in the future as Internet users find that they have no rights over deceased family members.

Please help.

Sincerely,

Stephanie Bemister
Seattle, WA

via The Consumerist, Click here to read the full post by Ben Popken...

So the last few days I've written about Facebook. After leaving Facebook, I remembered that I still had a MySpace account and figured I may as well delete it too while I'm at it. Before I did I looked around a bit and was shocked to see how MySpace had changed over the years. It's very similar to Facebook. Privacy controls, apps you can add to your profile, status updates/news feeds, find and recommend friends based on other friends. I think the only differences between MySpace and Facebook right now is that MySpace profiles can be made to look unique and there are specific profile archetypes for people/musicians/comedians/artists, etc. and their ToS and account deletion process.

MySpace takes a couple days to "process your account deletion" so they can remove all your content from their system as apposed to Facebook which wants to perpetually hold on to anything you upload forever. Like Facebook you get presented with the same awkward forms and so on to try understand why you're deleting your account. They're implemented differently, although both use Javascript effects to present you with custom reasons to stay as you fill out the form, MySpace uses a lightbox effect, and Facebook uses an innerHTML/expanding box approach. Also of note to me and other dyslexics is the confirmation process. Facebook shows you a captcha to make sure you're not a robot, but MySpace sends you a confirmation email to make sure you're you, screening for robots and people that may have hacked into your account.

Both MySpace and Facebook are moving towards a pay to promote business model. A few user generations from now where more privacy conscious people find MySpaces privacy settings, and more people join Facebook just to promote themselves and add as many friends as possible the two will be indistinguishable.

I thought since I'm on the subject I'd have a look at some other social networking sites, specifically the generic ones that try to do it all. The Facebooks and MySpaces if you will. But this post is already pretty long so I'll just leave you with some social network stupidity I've encountered over the last few days.

I'd been using Facebook as a contact database to keep track of everyone's email addresses and phone numbers, so before deleting my account I went through and copied the latest stuff into my phone. In searching for a particular friend the top search result was my own profile and noticed that they added a note to this paradoxical result, "Note: You can always find and click on your own profile in Search." Now why on earth would that ever be necessary. Equally disturbing, if you examine the screencap below is that Facebook lets you Message yourself.

Facebook doesn't let you delete a group. Instead you have to make it secret, and then kick each member out of the group one by one. Not only is this ridiculous, but the whole premise of a secret group on a social networking web site seems odd to me.

Now moving onto MySpace are people a) stupid enough not to understand that MySpace's scope of control doesn't stretch beyond the MySpace.com domain. b) unaware or new to the concept of phishing.. c) really contacting MySpace and blaming them after falling for a phising scam, and d) still not using a decent browser that alerts you when you're on a phishing site. It's my estimation that either all of the above is true giving a lot of weight to the theory of eugenics(to weed out these rediculously lost and confused people), or that MySpace is engaging in fear tactics to keep you on their site a bit longer by presenting you with what's essentially a page full of links back to ad-supported pages within MySpace.

I just ended my relationship with Facebook. Here's what that looked like: (click the images for a bigger legible version)

They say goodbye by showing you pictures of some of your friends telling them how much they'll miss you. (I didn't post the images, obviously).

Then they provide you with a complaint box:

For those of you with a screen reader I checked 'Other', and explained further:

You made drastic changes to your Terms of Use (A legal contract between you and I) without telling me. Even though in most countries that very act voids the contract, you attempted to compromised my identity, and take the rights to my content. Now you're pretending as though you didn't mean what you said. It's a shame that you have this incredible networking app, but can't find a way to be profitable without sacrificing your ethics. You broke my heart Facebook. You broke my heart.

And then on top of everything I had to struggle to dyslexically interpret a Captcha.. One of those things where you have to guess the letters to prove you're a human. Like trying to find the right key to the lock when I'm stuck in a trunk at the bottom of a swimming pool.

I logged in to see if they'd changed their Terms of Use back so I can delete my account and saw this.

Mark Zuckerberg the creator of Facebook posted a couple posts on the Facebook Blog.

A couple of weeks ago, we updated our terms of use to clarify a few points for our users. A number of people have raised questions about our changes, so I'd like to address those here. I'll also take the opportunity to explain how we think about people's information.

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they've asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn't help people share that information.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

In reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work. Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment.

We still have work to do to communicate more clearly about these issues, and our terms are one example of this. Our philosophy that people own their information and control who they share it with has remained constant. A lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective of the rights we need to provide this service to you. Over time we will continue to clarify our positions and make the terms simpler.

Still, the interesting thing about this change in our terms is that it highlights the importance of these issues and their complexity. People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people's information. These two positions are at odds with each other. There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.

We're at an interesting point in the development of the open online world where these issues are being worked out. It's difficult terrain to navigate and we're going to make some missteps, but as the leading service for sharing information we take these issues and our responsibility to help resolve them very seriously. This is a big focus for us this year, and I'll post some more thoughts on openness and these other issues soon.

and a few hours ago... a very similar post.

A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input.

Going forward, we've decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don't plan to leave it there for long.

More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren't just a document that protect our rights; it's the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world. Given its importance, we need to make sure the terms reflect the principles and values of the people using the service.

Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and 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.

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. In the meantime, we've changed the terms back to what existed before the February 4th change, which was what most people asked us for and was the recommendation of the outside experts we consulted.

If you'd like to get involved in crafting our new terms, you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we've created—Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I'm looking forward to reading your input.

They created a Facebook group titled:  Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, which is full of people complaining about and not understanding the issue.

And they returned to their old Terms of Service, which Defending Scoundrels has previously dissected in detail http://defendingscoundrels.com/2007/10/dissecting-the-facebook-terms.html.

The part in the old terms that I was waiting for is as follows:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

This means that as long as they don't update the terms before I delete my account, to say something like, "We own everything you've ever uploaded, and by logging in, even if only to delete your account you agree," I should be safe.

Also of note, the part of the removed Terms that said "Facebook can use your identity for whatever it wants, forever" is back to merely saying, "Facebook can use your content until you remove it". The key here is identity vs. content, what they can do with it, and the permanence of how they do it. Here's that excerpt:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

I developed a Facebook app, which has  a few hundred users. It's actually just a port of the Keith and The Girl Widget that another fan of the show created. He hasn't gotten back to me yet, but I have to add someone else as the developer/admin of the app before I delete my account or I think it'll just be locked or deleted or something. Hopefully while I sort that out Facebook won't try steal my soul again.

Myspace lost its credibility for a number of reasons. The final nail in the coffin, at least for me, was when they changed their Terms of Service so they they owned the music and all other content including blog posts and images you upload to the site. Facebook updated their Terms of Service on February 4th. They did it without notifying its users. They added a clause where by continuing to use the Facebook service after the terms were updated I, and everyone else, became binded by those terms. They removed a clause where deleting your account ceases their rights to your content.

It's not just an issue of Facebook now being able to use the content I did put up, but Facebook can now create or edit my content and claim I did it. It's about the possibility of Identity theft, defamation of character, etc. and an issue of the slick way they got their users to 'agree' to the terms. Facebook—long heralded as the anti-myspace, the good guys, now has the credibility of a second hand timeshare salesman.

The following is an excerpt from Facebook's ToS:

Licenses You are solely responsible for the User Content that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.

The following is Q&A for you who don't speak lawfirm:

What does that mean Yoav? Why is it so bad?

Facebook wants "irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license(with the right to sublicense)" to do stuff with my stuff.

What do you expect, they obviously need to have certain rights with your content otherwise they wouldn't be able to even display it on the site and it would be unusable, right?

a) Facebook's rights to my content should definitely be revokable, and they used to be.

b) Facebook should have notified its users of such a drastic change in their ToS instead of being shady.

c) Facebook does not need rights to "publically perform or display", "scan", "frame", "create derivative works and distribute(through multiple teers)" my content, that's ridiculous.

What else are these bastards trying to get away with?

They want all of these rights to apply, not just to everything you've ever put on Facebook, but to anything anywhere in the world that talks about or alludes to Facebook. This may be a typo, the word 'connection' can be interpreted multiple ways, it's still fucked up. It's most likely a reference to "Facebook Connect" which lets you login to other 3rd party sites using your Facebook credentials.

They want to be able to use my "name, likeness and image for any purpose," in other words they want to be able to call CNN and tell them that "Yoav Givati loves facebook", or "Yoav Givati married a giraffe and flew to Mexico for the honeymoon after stuffing his face with wedding cake" and I can't do anything legally to stop them. They can even put me in a commercial without compensating me, speak for me in public, commit crimes in my name, sell and perform any art or content I've uploaded in the past, and other unspeakable thing that I, as a not evil internet company, cannot imagine.

But Yoav, I'm sure once they see everyone's reaction to this they'll change it to something more acceptable.. right?

No, Facebook's big revenue idea(after years of not being profitable) is to use people's image to sell products to each other. like "Yoav went to so and so amusement park yesterday! he loved it, click here to buy tickets" This used to be an opt in feature, but no one opted in, and it used to be based on fact, like say if I had actually gone to an amusement park, now it doesn't have to be.

What to do now?

It would be stupid to just delete my account now when there's a chance they'll reconstitute their ToS to include a clause that severs their complete and unlimited ownership and carte blanche of my content and identity upon account deletion. If I just delete my account now I'd be doing so with the current terms, which I do not accept. I've taken down all my content except my email address, and I've deleted all my posts and groups(except yoav's pinky finger which I'm not an administrator of since I landed on that island with my coconut radio I made.) Facebook does still claim to have copies of everything archived and still has the right to use those copies as described above. I removed my content merely to show my distaste for the road Facebook as gone down and to make it clear to my friends that I don't use Facebook anymore, and won't.