by Robin Wauters on February 17, 2009

Isn’t it ironic that Facebook, which is so often used by groups of people to protest and demand changes for just about anything, has reverted to its former Terms Of Services under pressure of the community?

After trying to calm everyone down first, Mark Zuckerberg has now posted a new blog post stating that the company will revert to its previous ToS while they “resolve the issues that people have raised” (the post is being hammered right now so it’s going up and down).

The company has even polled some of its users in news feeds asking them if they should go back to their previous ToS.

According to the young CEO, it’s a language thing and they just did a poor job explaining the changes. But those changes will still be coming in the next few weeks, this time including the Facebook user community to make sure everyone can live with it / gets it (I always thought it was impossible to please everyone, but anyway):

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.

Update: Barry Schnitt, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook, weighed in on the discussion on the “People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)” group.

Facebook has set up a group for its “Bill Of Rights”, where people will be able to provide feedback on the ToS changes. Only 2,000 people have joined the group at the time of this writing.

This isn’t the first time the company backtracks on a decision that got its users and outsiders all riled up. Beacon, anyone?

Original article here

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Let’s see what they come up with … from the sounds of this, they’re going to shove the same piece of work down our throats using different words. Be aware. It will be too late to complain when they arrogate your work (or photos, or blog posts, or … ) to themselves.

It’s beginning to look as if there’s not a single honest social networking system on the internet … and I’m sad to have to acknowledge that Facebook has joined the ranks of all of the other losers who decide that what’s yours, is theirs.

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

– John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron of Acton (1834–1902)

We’ve had some recent experiences with some of these “great men” … whom I won’t name, because we all know who they are. They weren’t the first; years ago, there were other “pioneers” who allowed a bit of success to go their heads … and at that time, I figured out a few ways to get on top of the problem, and keep my intellectual property out of the greedy hands of those who would take advantage of me. It takes a bit of work, but if done properly, will allow you to disentangle yourself from a thief while leaving very little of your information and intellectual property behind.

First of all, you need to not only delete your information, you need to change …. and save it … not once, but at least twice. Hold off on changing your name and login for last, so that you can continue to log in until the job is done. It’s tedious, and may take a while.

Birthdays, and all other personal information can be overwritten with random bits of trivia, all unrelated to reality. Fill it all out again with bogus information, and save it … make another small change to anything there, then save it again. Doing it this way, the second save should not only overwrite the current information, but should also cause the backed up information to be overwritten by the bogus info you provided on the first save.

Regarding photographs, you can upload anything you want under the name of the photograph you want to replace. For example, rename a blank graphic, or any other graphic you’d like to use (I’ve made some that intend to use ¹ – and you’re welcome to copy and use them too) and rename it to the same name as the photo you’d like to replace.

That will overwrite the photo that was already there. It’s tedious, renaming a graphic over and over, and uploading it to replace what was already there, but it’s the only way that I believe you can actually “take back” your photographs and graphics.

Remember to delete your RSS links to Facebook from your blogs. Also, replace any written text with a nonsense line of text, and be certain to save it at least twice, using a tiny change in the sentence to ensure that it actually does get overwritten on the second save.

Don’t leave anything of yours behind for them to use. If you get stuck with something that you can’t seem to delete, post it in the comments, and we’ll try to figure it out together.

Let’s send out a message to all of the greedy social networking big shots who think they can get away with this stuff … let’s let them know: We won’t let them!

More info:

How to Find Your Facebook Status RSS Feed

RSS feeds on Facebook

Facebook CEO to Scared Users: Trust Us

People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)

1) Replacement banners:

Thanks to Deneen Ballard for initially calling the information to my attention.

Here we go again …

I’m going to really miss this one … :o(

Keep an eye out for a followup post: how to protect yourself as you back out of the door …

.Excerpt from Fox News

Once a Facebook member, always a member.

The Consumerist blog noticed Sunday that the social-networking giant had quietly made a change to its user Terms of Service (TOS) on Feb. 4.

Facebook now declares that it has a perpetual license to use anything you post to your own Facebook page — even if you terminate your account.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the change as necessary in a blog posting Monday afternoon.

Here’s the licensing part of the legalese, which sounds bad enough:

“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.”

In other words, while it doesn’t actually own your photos, scribblings and status updates — you do — Facebook can do whatever it wants with it, whenever it wants, in order to promote itself or create or sell ads.

Theoretically, it can even “license” a picture of your kids for use in a third party’s ad campaign.

Most of that has been part of the Facebook Terms of Service for a while. After all, without user-generated content, Facebook would be nothing.

What’s been removed is this: “If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however (sic) you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”

And what’s been added is this: “The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service” — after which follows a list of most of the sections on the Terms of Service page.

So even if you decide Facebook isn’t for you, the site can still use anything you posted. It’s all been archived.

“I’m done with Facebook,” declared blogger Ed Champion upon learning of the TOS changes.

He seemed more annoyed at the older blanket license than the new never-say-die part of the legalese — ironic considering that if he’d deleted his account before Feb. 4 his account really would have been gone for good.

In his blog posting, Zuckerberg explained that the language had to be tweaked to resolve a conflict over ownership of messages posted by one Facebook user onto another user’s page.

“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,” he writes. “Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message.”

Zuckerberg then makes a subtle but persuasive legal argument.

“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,” he points out.

“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 [sic] you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.”

(All emphases mine)

Excerpt from Fox News

This is what I got as a reply to the eMail I sent:

Hi Moofie,

I wanted to let you know that we have deleted your profile and posts on Wellsphere from your blog at http://moof.blogsplot.net/.

I wondered if you might like to connect with me personally, perhaps with a chat by phone.

Feel free to call me on my cell, XXX XXX-XXXX, or send me your number and a time, and I’ll be happy to call you.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey W. Rutledge MD, PhD
Chief Medical Information Officer
Wellsphere Inc.
Dr.Rutledge@wellsphere.com
(XXX) XXX-XXXX

This was my reply:

Dr. Rutledge, I honestly don’t know what we’d talk about. All of the points I’ve made are true, and have been witnessed and/or experienced by a great many other bloggers.

At first, I just felt cheated after I joined, because you dumped me into parenting – exactly where I told you I didn’t want to be, and where you reassured me that I wouldn’t be. I was writing some pretty dark posts on my blog at the time, and those were being rss’ed into the parenting group! Even when I wrote to tell you about that, I didn’t hear from you. I had to stop blogging on my own blog until I could figure out what to do – those posts were never meant to be fed to a mommy group! I ended up having to manually delete myself from the Parenting group. The deletion worked, but that just dumped me into general medicine.

That’s when things began to be more than just personally disconcerting. Although I have absolutely no medical training or experience, you put a big blue EXP next to my name, and labeled me as a “Health Maven for the General Medicine Community”, and as a “Top Health Blogger.” This was enough to give unwary readers the false idea that I might be able to offer some “general” medical advice. Not only that, but you *encouraged* your “mavens” to answer as many questions as they could so that they could achieve “Top Health Maven” status. All of that with no consistent or official medical oversight! Looking through the questions, most went unanswered … and of those that someone actually did reply to, a great many were answered by people who have absolutely no business “practicing medicine”. At this time, if the answers given to your readers were compiled and researched, I think that some medical board someplace would be completely nonplussed to realize that a large (very large) part of the questions were answered by people who are not legally (or practically) qualified to give medical advice. And you, a physician, allowed (actively encouraged?) it …

I wonder how many people have been seriously hurt by this …

Even before I joined, I was a bit wary of the fact that alternative medicine groups were given equal footing and credibility as the science based medical groups. That shows yet another lack of concern for the well being of people who trusted you.

If you want to talk, I’m willing … but as I said above, I don’t know what more there is to say. Since you have taken the Hippocratic Oath, and receive immediate respect and trust from so many because of the initials after your name, I can only hope that you yourself were duped by someone further up the food chain. But even then, I don’t see how you could have not known what was going on.

Doris “Moof” Ballard
Berwick, ME
All Blogged Up: A Moof’s Tale
(XXX) XXX-XXXX

Anyone else have something to share?

There’s a wave flowing across the medical blogosphere … and it’s gaining momentum!

Last year, I received some flattering emails from a fellow name Geoff Rutledge. I ignore the first few emails because I simply wasn’t interested, but when one of the emails mentioned getting to answer questions asked by other users, and having opportunities to ask some of our own, I imagined that it would be something like WebMD … and I joined. Dr. Rutledge was very kind and attentive until I actually bit … and then, well …

When I agreed to join, he wanted to put me in the parenting group. Sorry people, but I’m way too old to fit in that group – my kids have kids, I’m a bit old fashioned about raising children, and I simply do not approve of some of the more popular child raising ideas. I told Dr. Rutledge that I would join, but that I didn’t want to be in parenting – I wanted to be in the “Kidney Failure” group. He assured me that I would be.

When I logged on for the first time, I saw that I had, indeed, been placed in the parenting group after all. I wrote to the dear man, and asked him to please move me out of there into something more appropriate. No reply … no action. At the time, I was just coming back to blogging, and had written some pretty gnarly, dark posts. I was humiliated and disturbed when I realized that those posts had ended up in the parenting group’s collection. Dr. Rutledge had told me that each subject would appear in its own group – not so! I wrote to Dr. Rutledge again, this time expressing my desire to be removed from that parenting group a bit more forcefully. Still no reply.

In a fit of pique, I logged in and deleted my connection to the parenting group – wondering what would happen. I found that it just dumped me in the General Medicine Group instead. Poo! Again not my department … but at least better than parenting.

I did my best to answer questions when I felt confident enough with the subject, but that wasn’t very often. In fact, it began to bother me that no one seemed to be moderating the comments or the replies. I’m supposed to be a “Health Maven” in the “General Medicine” group … and I got my qualifications from …. a Cracker Jacks box? Wellsphere made it appear as if I was someone knowledgeable in General Medicine, and no one was checking in to make sure I wasn’t killing someone with bad advice! Dude! In fact, most of the questions which were sent in weren’t being answered at all, or they were being answered by numbos like me. Answers from real medical professionals were meager. Imagine if the readers took Wellsphere seriously, and actually trusted our replies!!!

Anyway, I had gotten pretty irritated with the place, and I began deleting their emails a while back. I had no idea what was going on until I saw Wellsphere come up over and over on Twitter last night, and decided I’d better take a peek. What I found out really put me off …

It seems that HealthCentral Network has acquired Wellsphere! Whoa! Wait a minute! That’s my blog content they’re selling! That’s not much different than what Bitacle was doing back in 2006.

My personal opinion of Wellsphere is not only are they thieves, they’re also dangerous … they let everyone and his brother give medical advice over the internet, with little or no moderation. They also lie about a person’s qualifications to give advice! Health Maven indeed!

“No, I’m not a doctor, but I did sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night”

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Here is a list of bloggers who are posting about Wellsphere … please take a look:

Getting Better with Dr. Val

In Sickness and in Health

Musings of a Distractible Mind

Rural Doctoring

Symtym

Doctor Anonymous

Kevin MD

Chronic Babe

Science Based Medicine

Six Until Me

Medi Medi Mary

Twitter Comments – through Vijay

And don’t forget the Dr. Anonymous show tonight at 9 PM
(Thursday the 29th of January)
… they’ll be discussing this very subject!

I expect that as soon as this post hits Wellsphere’s site, mine will look a bit like Six Until Me’s account! ;o)