I Might Drop Facebook
Facebook has become an integral part of my social life over the past year or so. However, recent events in my life have reminded me of the hazards of storing important content online. It's easy to forget that beyond the threat of unexpected erasure, there's the fact that some content you upload to certain sites may no longer be yours. This is from The Consumerist (Facebook's New Terms Of Service: We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.):
Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.
See the original post for the whole text describing the details. Reading something like this makes me think of how naive we all are when we put family photos and personal thoughts onto websites when the fine print is often hard to understand, and sometimes changes. I do wonder whether these sites that offer so much fun and convenience might take away more than they give.
Time will tell what I decide to do. In the meantime, I hope a lot more people take some time out to reconsider where they put their personal data, and what they choose to upload to Facebook and other sites in the first place.
