Commentary

Exclusive! Facebook's New Privacy Policy

  1. Privacy

    Your privacy is very important to us. We designed our Data Use Policy to make important disclosures about how you can use Facebook to share with others and how we collect and can use your content and information. We encourage you to read the Data Use Policy, and to use it to help you make informed decisions. Not that you will, but we totally encourage you to. We’d also like you to observe the food pyramid and separate your recyclables. Ha ha ha ha! As if!
     
  2. Sharing Your Content and Information

    You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook. However, you don’t own  own it. In agreeing to these terms -- which you will of course do, because, duh, you will never read this -- you consent to sharing with Facebook and its partners everything you post here. If you post a picture of your cat here, we can use it as well. If someone else posts a photo of you getting teabagged at a frat party, guess what? That’s ours, too. And we can use that in advertising or anything else we choose in perpetuity. In fact, we will put it in the newsfeed of all of your friends, family and colleagues. Why? Because we can, that’s why. As we like to say, if you don’t want a picture of someone’s genitals dangling in your face being the subject of a Facebook ad, why not try another universal global social network?
  3.  In addition:
    1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission: you grant us non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook. You record a song and post it -- it’s ours. You take a photo and post it -- it’s ours. You invent a water engine and mention it -- that’s ours, too. 
    2. If, in the course of having a Facebook account, you become a parent and make reference to the offspring via text, photo, music, video or any means on Facebook, the child becomes the property of Facebook.
    3. When you use a Facebook application, the application will have access to your contacts, your browsing history, your keystrokes, your documents, your media folders, your passwords, your medical records, your banking records, your credit history, your sexual history, your waking thoughts and your dreams. We can also turn on your device cameras and just keep an eye on you. Phil, is that you? Oh my God, what are you doing? Ewww.
    4. We always appreciate your feedback or other suggestions about Facebook, but you understand that we may use them without any obligation to compensate you for them. For instance, a number of helpful users asked us to stop spamming their newsfeeds with Sponsored Stories, which, of course, are no more stories than billboards are scenery. Some especially objected to seeing their names in those ads “endorsing” a product or services they had never explicitly endorsed, much less been asked permission to be used as a shill. In fact, 614,000 of them objected in federal court in the form of a class-action suit and, long story short, just this one time, we are compensating them to the tune of $20 million. In the future, though, understand that clicking the Like button makes you an implicit endorser whether you like it or not, and we will never, ever, ever let you forget it. By the same token,  we will never, ever, ever stop monetizing your indiscriminate publication of things that you are stupid to reveal.

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2 comments about "Exclusive! Facebook's New Privacy Policy".
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  1. Jesus Grana from Independent, September 9, 2013 at 11:14 a.m.

    Agree to the multiple privacy concerns but it wouldn't be fair to single out FB as the the worst offender - if you get a chance check my "diatribe" on why I don't trust Google http://wp.me/p3Twzg-jb

  2. Sean Tracey from Sean Tracey Associates, September 9, 2013 at 2:06 p.m.

    I love this article. But we're all doing it. Would someone please come up with a way to revolt without checkin out of social media all together?

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