We’re Updating Our Terms of Service to Better Explain How Facebook Works
newsroom.fb.com
newsroom.fb.com
> Here’s a summary of the information we’ve added to our terms:
> How we make money: We include more details on how we make money, including a new introduction explaining that we don’t charge you money to use our products because businesses and organizations pay us to show you ads.
> Content removals: We provide more information about what happens when we remove content that violates our terms or policies.
> Your intellectual property rights: We clarify that when you share your own content — like photos and videos — you continue to own the intellectual property rights in that content. You grant us permission to do things like display that content, and that permission ends when the content is deleted from Facebook. This is how many online services work and has always been the case on Facebook.
> What happens when you delete: We’re providing more detail about what happens when you delete content you’ve shared. For example, when you delete something you’ve posted, it’s no longer visible but it can take up to 90 days to be removed from our systems.
Or is there some other reason?
It’s literally impossible to rewrite a contract and claim that its meaning or interpretation hasn’t changed. The way a legal term is phrased is hugely important especially when there is ambiguity.
I understand FB’s intent here and I don’t think the line is meant to deceive. For example, adding terms to the agreement that make the user’s acceptance of how they are monetized conditioned on usage (which has always been required but is now explicit) may have big ramifications for anyone wanting to sue FB for fraud or the like.
Easy to understand terms are a good thing, but I think it would be better to say something like “we have attempted to capture the same meaning of the prior policy while using easier to understand language” or the like would have been more accurate.
To be scrupulously fair, that could well be interpreted as "We were already committed, as a matter of policy and/or applicable law[0], to upholding these additional terms not mentioned in the previous contract, and all we're doing now is formally documenting something we were already doing.", but that would require assuming good faith on the part of Facebook of all entities, so no.
0: eg adding "We guarrantee we will provide a replacement [widget] if the one you ordered arrives damaged." in a jurisdiction where that's legally required anyway.
Obviously don't take everything of what he says at face value and realise that it is without a doubt a public face, but the topics he's approached and guests he's had on to debate him have been fantastic and engaging thus far (including: Jonathan Zittrain, a specialist in tech law from Harvard; Mathias Dopfner, the CEO of Europe's largest news publisher; Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, Homo Deus, etc; and Jenny Martinez, the dean of Stanford Law). It's made me see him in a much different light then that of his uncomfortable public speaker persona.