NET RESULTS:Facebook users angered by its revised terms ought to look again at what they have already signed up to, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

THE FACEBOOK fiasco of the last few weeks demonstrates people’s very odd relationship with social networking and profile sites. On the one hand, millions sign up with a swift click in the ubiquitous box accepting lengthy terms and conditions they never bothered to read. And then, they proceed to upload a vast range of personal information, generally for “friends” to read that are not, by any usual measurement, actual friends at all.

Or they leave their profiles open for anyone to read.

On the other hand, very, very occasionally, people get properly angry about the terms they are being asked to agree to.

In the case of the recent outcry, Facebook users were annoyed in their tens of thousands by the company’s new terms of agreement which – in confusing legalese – seemed to ask users to agree to sign over the rights to just about anything they posted, and to allow Facebook to use that material in any way it wished, forever and ever.

In the face of growing user fury, Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg backed down fairly quickly and said that, while words didn’t really mean what people thought they were saying and they wouldn’t do naughty things (“In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want”), Facebook would nonetheless revert to its old terms of agreement and redraft, in a more accessible way, the new terms.

Fair play to Zuckerberg on that score. It isn’t easy to publicly acknowledge a mistake and promise to listen to your “customers” (though they are not actually paying anything for the service, of course) and reverse direction. That was the correct way to handle an embarrassing situation, though it remains to be seen what improvements will appear in the new terms of agreement.

Call me cynical, but the wording of the disputed terms did seem pretty much to do what people were complaining about – grant Facebook control of whatever users uploaded to the site. The company was given “an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide licence” to “use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute” things users placed on the site.

Yikes. I think, like thousands of worried users, that I’d rather not have to trust the executives who promised “that isn’t really what we would do or mean”.

Still, what exactly was it about the old terms did people think were so preferable? I wrote about the old terms just about a year ago, when questions were being raised about how these sites planned to manage people’s personal – sometimes very personal – details.

The old terms don’t look all that much better. For example, if you signed up for Facebook last year under the old terms of agreement:

1) you agreed to receive any advertising the site wants to send you based on all the information in your profile. One earlier attempt to let third parties advertise to members based on this information – a programme called Beacon – backfired and Facebook had to back down then, too. Yet six weeks later, the company was quietly testing a new system that placed links to its mobile software onto smart-phones without the permission of the devices’ owners;

2) you can’t delete anything (they hold a backup of prior versions of people’s profile);

3) your information could be viewed by unauthorised people (you acknowledge that you accept that they cannot guarantee who views your profile, that privacy and safety measures may fail);

4) Facebook may search for other sources of information on you on the web (“Facebook may collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services and other users of the Facebook service ... in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised service”);

5) the CIA or FBI may look at your personal information (as your data is processed in the US, they say they reserve the right to hand it over if asked to by law enforcement or government agencies), and that they reserve the right to view it themselves if they suspect fraud, to protect their interests or property, etc.

Yet all of that scary detail got a lot less traction in the media, and, as a result, in the public eye, though the Guardian did a detailed and worrying piece about the subject back then.

Whatever about rewriting and reshaping the new terms, people need to better understand the old terms – and all terms – when they sign up for sites that may hold deeply personal information on them for years and years. And they need to think carefully about what they post to such sites in the first place if they don’t want everything they post to live on, mothballed and visible for ages online.

Blog and podcasts: www.techno-culture.com