This link:
http://bit.ly/qeZ8de
is a useful article on changing your Facebook privacy settings so random people on the Internet who happen to be friends of one of your friends can't see posts on *your* profile.
Strangely, I think this ticker is very similar to the news feed that people got very upset about a couple of years ago. I think that our feelings about privacy may have evolved. My friend Jen posted this first.
The Pennsylvania Disciplinary Board discussed Facebook/MySpace and how two trial courts -- in New York and Pennsylvania -- have issued orders compelling parties to turn over their Facebook/MySpace passwords.
Here are links to the New York and Pennsylvania cases.
In these cases, I'll concede that the parties foolishly posted information relevant to their cases on the social networking site. Nonetheless, I am not sure I agree with the two judge's decisions. Just because the privacy policies of both these sites say that the information can be disclosed pursuant to a court order does not give a court carte blanche to grant someone access to someone's Facebook or MySpace profile. While people can choose to make information public on social network sites, they also might store personal information as well. In some ways, these sites are similar to any email provider. Gmail's privacy policy says something quite similar about disclosure.
The moral of this story, though, is that people should be very careful with what they post on MySpace or Facebook.
There's been an interesting discussion in both the mainstream media and Facebook's blog (there have been two entries) about Facebook and copyright law. My three cents is that the only thing that Facebook needs a perpetual license to is an email that I send to a friend via Facebook. I think it's weird that they'd even need this, given the fact that one normally doesn't think of email as copyrighteable. If I send an email on Gmail to my friend on Yahoo!, am I really granting Gmail a license to copy my email and send it to my friend? Ordinarily, I wouldn't have the need to claim copyright on an email I sent. Even if I was sending my friend a manuscript for a book I was writing, could I then sue Gmail for copyright infringement? I don't think I'd have a cause of action.
Anything else that I post on Facebook, like a wall post or photo, can be deleted. Therefore, any license I give Facebook for posting something like that should be revocable at my will.
I wonder whether someone who sued Facebook for copyright infringement for redistributing his or her pictures would even have a cause of action (so long as Facebook posted them in compliance with his or her privacy settings). I guess Facebook is covering itself, but are they going over the top?
Flickr's terms of service are pretty clear. Once I remove my content from Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo!), Yahoo!'s license to display and/or distribute this information is instantly revoked. Sometimes, as when I submit content to a Flickr-sponsored group, the license, by its terms (you'll need a Yahoo!/Flickr account to see these terms), expires at a certain time.
Google's answer to Flickr (Picasa Web), on the other hand, has much broader (and less favorable) terms for me as an end-user. If I upload a photo to Picasa Web, under the terms of service (Section 11.1), I give Google what essentially amounts to an irrevocable royalty-free license to display my information. As a result, I don't use Picasa much.
It's interesting to see what at tangled web is woven with all these license agreements. It also shows the importance of reading license agreements.
