Never Trust Facebook

This is the pragmatic view to take as a user. However, I don't think it's how we want sites to operate. Facebook's ToS state:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

I think this violates the grant that the user is giving Facebook. If they deleted the content, it's supposed to be gone - Facebook no longer has a license to display it on their site. Facebook has, in public communications, stated that the qualification there is about their messages where you could send effectively an email to another person and both sides have to delete the message - just like with email.

As human beings, we should do a lot of things for pragmatic purposes. That doesn't make it good. In a certain way, it's like knowing that you live in a neighborhood with a criminal and "well, I guess it's my fault that I didn't lock my door or even bothered to go out of the house."

I'm all for Facebook changing to try and do new things, but sometimes there's a lack of consent that's disturbing given that Facebook has been telling users to expect control over their sharing. We've seen articles about the ability for third parties to add you to a group and for that adding to be advertized to your friends. I understand that we should consider anything we post to Facebook public. However, Facebook has strongly encouraged us to put things we don't want public on Facebook with an assurance of privacy. As such, I don't think it's unreasonable to rake Facebook over the coals over this (if it's true). It's the type of bad behavior that should be admonished.

I'm certainly not arguing that companies need to do what their users want or anything like that. However, we call out bad companies as bad. In this case, it looks like they're even violating their own ToS (if the story is true). If Facebook had started out like Tumblr or Twitter or Geocities where you're really trying to post public content, it would be one thing. Facebook didn't start out that way and, in fact, encouraged us to think of them as protecting private content. Let's say Google decided to sell or publicly display your email tomorrow. We'd admonish that. It's a violation without your permission. Is the reason we should consider things posted to Facebook as public that we've seen Facebook be scummy for years now and should have learned that their promises are nonsense?

I don't think you're wrong or anything. I just think that "buyer beware" or "well, you shouldn't have rented an apartment in that neighborhood" are great ways to look at it.

* P.S. Nothing in this comment is meant to cast judgement on whether or not Facebook is doing the things the article accuses them of. I haven't researched it. It's simply to note that Facebook portrays itself as both 1. not sharing your content further than you allow and 2. allowing you to remove content other than things like messages which might be in someone else's inbox. If they're violating that, they're violating what they're telling users.

I just remembered a very interesting tale.

There is a social networks for some stuff that you don't want known (for example, sexual fetishes, or gay stuff, or anti-government stuff, and so on).

I know a case where someone (that was never found out who, although there are some suspects) in one of those social networks started to attack some other people there. Until things started to get out of hand, with the person finding the Facebook profiles of those involved (even if they had completely fake profiles) and posting on that network, and then getting their profile in that network and posting back on Facebook...

Then the attacker posted on the niche social network the Facebook profiles of children of the victims, stuff escalated to the point of people hiring private investigators and professional assassins (some of the victims were soldiers and/or military police shock troops, and were not amused at all at threats toward their family... and happily supported plans for a assassination).

Happily the attacker suddenly gave up, and things de-escalated... But it made me much more aware that social networks can be VERY dangerous...

Of course (considering the tone of social networks here, professions of those involved, and that people wanted to do illegal stuff) I cannot explain better or give more information.

"Facebook has value, but no matter what your privacy settings are set to, no matter what you delete, always assume that anything you write or do on Facebook - in any context - will be embarrassingly public. 1) Because it will and 2) because it just makes life easier."

The problem here is that I do consider everything I do on the Internet to be public, but most average people don't. This is why I don't have a Facebook, which admittedly is probably a big killer for my social life in my age group being a late teenager. People in their late teens/early twenties are reckless when it comes to the Internet and I simply can't risk being associated with any of that.

Just use better alternatives like Diaspora.