Personal

Facebook Owns You (and Your Content)

This is something that I’ve always known about (and most of you), but it has come to a point that its significance has changed my actions.

If you follow the Terms of Service on Facebook, it states:

…By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

In short, they own you your work, your pictures, your information, everything. Even if you take it off and it expires they most certainly have a backup of it someplace and thus can do whatever they want with it, like sell it to marketers. I’m not saying they do, nor do I fully understand the scope of their business model, but that is something I can’t really abide by with respect to my photography.

While I love to think that my photos have some merit and are worthy of publication, even in the smallest sense, there is a possibility that they can be used without complete consent or credit.

Flickr on the other hand has incorporated the Creative Commons policy that protects me (bless the hearts of the original Flickr creators and their open source mindedness.

The message I’m getting at is that I won’t be posting any more pictures on Facebook that I have taken time to compose, process and share with my friends. If you’re really interested in what I do, you can check out my photos on Flickr and leave your comments there.

Some may think that my photos will get taken anyways because people can just right click and save to their desktop. Well that isn’t true. That’s been disabled so ha!

Finally, yes, I’m still working on getting my Europe pictures processed, and to Richard, Alex and Brolen, I am burning DVDs of all 3,300+ photos now. I can give them to you later this week over a couple drinks.