Facebook retreats on content change after protests

For now, the online panic can subside.

Facebook, the popular online social networking Web site, angered many of its 175 million users this week after it changed its policy for keeping the content its users removed. The change to its terms of service drew so much fury that Facebook reverted to an older version early Wednesday.

The terms posted about two weeks ago said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses after an account was ended. It also cut a provision that said Facebook’s license expired when content was deleted.

Content control and privacy issues are paramount among the site’s users, many of them in high school and college. After the blog Consumerist.com pointed out the changes this week, protest groups formed — on Facebook. Services like Twitter lit up with angry comments. Feeling uncertain about how Facebook could use the content, some hastily removed old photos and long-forgotten chatter.

Dave Kell, owner of the InDecatur blog, posted news about the changes on Twitter. He’s careful with what he shares online, and didn’t worry how Facebook might use his content — but he didn’t like that it could. Changes to the terms of service should have been discussed more openly with users immediately, he said.

“It violates the whole concept of social media,” said Kell, 63, a Facebook user for about a year. “They let the lawyers get out of control. They really hurt themselves badly. It’s a trust issue now.”

The backlash made news, but online content ownership and privacy is an old issue for tools like Facebook and Google, said Amy Bruckman, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. When Facebook’s newsfeed debuted in 2006, users fought it. Now, Bruckman said, it’s hard to imagine Facebook without constant updates fed directly to friends.

But companies sometimes charge forward too quickly, before the community evolves, she said. Facebook could have pre-empted the panic by being more specific in its terms of service and planning ahead for privacy concerns. Applying licenses through Creative Commons, a nonprofit that makes sharing creative work easier by providing free licenses, can resolve some ownership issues, she said.

For all the learning companies have to do, Bruckman said, users should learn from these incidents, too.

“Whenever you put your personal information online in any form,” she said, “you are taking risks with your privacy and your intellectual property.”