The worldâs fastest growing social networking site Facebook has been at the centre of a media storm this week after noticed the companyâs terms and conditions had been altered to let it sell or share the data of users that have closed their accounts.
After outraged users launched a petition and the worldâs media jumped on the story, Facebook , and escaped threats of legal action from civil liberties campaigners. But in terms of the power it holds over usersâ data, Facebook has actually lost very little.
âThe current Facebook change causing all the fuss is pretty minimal,â says , a specialist in Internet Law at the University of Sheffield.
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âOut there foreverâ
The siteâs have always granted the company a licence to âuse, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distributeâ any user content, âfor any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwiseâ.
âBasically they have always grabbed all your data, now it just means you donât âget it backâ if you delete your profile,â Edwards says. âBut thatâs pretty meaningless as, once your dataâs got to third parties, itâs out there forever.â
It seems that if Facebook users really are concerned about controlling their own data, they have larger battles ahead than restoring the deleted sentences.
Under pressure
The growing company, sustained so far largely by venture capitalists, has little choice but to control usersâ data, points out Simon Halberstam, head of social networking law at , the e-commerce arm of London law firm, Sprecher Grier Halberstam. âAll of the value in these sites is in the user data,â he says. Most social networks maintain similar policies on user data for the same reason.
The small alteration to the terms and conditions is part of a continuing effort to maximise the earnings from user data, he thinks. âInvestors might be getting agitated and impatient with Facebookâs failure to capitalise on the user content they have captured,â he says. âIf they can increase their ability to use that data, including provision thereof to third parties, it makes everyone who has invested in the company much happier.â
Those investors have other reasons to be restless. Just last week it was accidentally revealed by a law firm employed by Facebook that the business .
Too late for most
The bottom line is that Facebook, yet again, is embroiled in an unnecessary , says at Oxford Universityâs Internet Institute. âI donât think they were trying to do anything underhand,â he says. âThe mistake they made was to change the terms and conditions without any discussion, without flagging this up to users â and it has blown up in their faces.â
But despite the outrage among users, itâs unlikely that the altered conditions would have applied to those already using the site. âIf youâve signed up to Facebook and the terms and conditions were specifically set out at the time, those are the terms and conditions by which youâre bound,â says Halberstam. Unless Facebook asks users to re-subscribe to a new agreement, any edits to the user agreement will only apply to new subscribers.
âThere may be something in the original terms and conditions to which users agreed saying Facebook is entitled to change the conditions from time to time, but thatâs probably unenforceable under European law,â Halberstam adds.
