Facebook privacy story a beat-up

This is the news due wednesday.



Facebook's chief privacy officer has spoken out defending the company's controversial decision to change its terms of use, saying the entire story was a beat-up and Facebook never intended to use people's personal information outside of the site.

It was the latest in a series of privacy rows for the social networking site as its 175 million users wise up to the dangers of publishing their personal details on the internet through a commercial entity.

In a telephone interview, Chris Kelly said despite Facebook rolling back the changes, which gave the company "irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid worldwide license" to users' information even after they deleted their account, the social network did not believe it had done anything wrong.

Kelly said the license was only intended to cover the site against legal action under copyright law and only allowed the company to use people's photos and other information on the Facebook site and within the privacy settings chosen by each individual.

"License is different to ownership ... So the speculation about people's faces showing up on billboards or Facebook owning the photos that they uploaded was just completely false," Kelly said.

"If you had only agreed to display a photograph for instance to five users, which you can do under your Facebook privacy settings, Facebook's license only extended far enough to allow us to display that photograph to those five users."

The issue flared up after consumer advocate blog Consumerist wrote that Facebook had tweaked its terms of service to give it more control over users' information, even after a user deleted their account.

It led to thousands of news stories all over the world and many Facebook users vowed to delete their account in protest. People who attempt to delete their account today are first shown a message from the site apologising for the terms of use "mistake".

Speaking to The New York Times, Consumerist co-executive editor Ben Popken said that the original blog post had been viewed more than 580,000 times by Wednesday - the site's most popular post ever.

But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Kelly, said the changes were only made to make the site's policies clearer to users. The clause stating that Facebook could use user information even after they deleted their account was meant to ensure messages left on friends' Facebook pages would not disappear.

Kelly said Facebook only rolled back to the former terms of service to make it clear that the site's intention was not to own users' information. People are now being invited to join the Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities group to share their thoughts on Facebook's privacy policies. ( http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=69048030774)

"I think we're at an interesting time in the history of the world when a lot of things that weren't recorded or captured in any form are being captured [and shared] - and people are understandably nervous about that," Kelly said.

"I think that people are by and large very concerned about online privacy and with having more control over their data and their information, and we think that's very important and we've always recognised that by investing a great deal in building an infrastructure that allows them to choose who gets to see their information, as opposed to saying either you put it up on the internet or you don't."