(Students need to realize that Facebook retains their uploaded information even if they delete an account)
Recent changes in Facebook's terms of use have led to anger among students who have long overestimated the privacy of their information.
Students are just now realizing what they should have known all along.
That they have all but sold their souls to Facebook.
According to Facebook's terms of use" users ""grant Facebook an irrevocable" perpetual nonexclusive transferable fully paid" worldwide license"" to use" display modify and publish their information among a wide host of other uses.
This essentially gives Facebook access to use any and all of your information for advertising site promotion or any other use it deems necessary.
Earlier last week Consumerist.com discovered that Facebook had removed a provision in its terms of use that stated this license would become void upon removal of an account.
Therefore Facebook asserted its right to essentially hold everything a user uploaded in its archives indefinitely.
A user's information could remain even after he or she chooses to delete the account locked away in Facebook's archives.
This troubling notion prompted tens of thousands of users to join protest groups on the site fearing that their posted information was being stolen by Facebook.
After these protests Facebook reverted to its previous terms of use. So Facebook will still have all your information forever it just won't be able to use it if you delete your account.
For many it was surely the first time that they had even seen the 7000-word terms of use contract that they had entered into.
But thankfully the terms of use also state that keeping the information doesn't imply ownership and that any information is still the user's intellectual property.
It's all too easy for users to blindly accept the terms and conditions of Web sites all over the Internet. The length and legal jargon encourages us to ignore them.
Students should allow the recent Facebook controversy to be a lesson of what they are sacrificing by blindly agreeing to contracts they refuse to even glance at.
