Facebook & privacy controversy

Facebook has bowed to the users' verdict by rolling back the changes that it had made to its privacy policy in the wake of severe crticism by
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users and also a federal complaint from a leading privacy advocacy organization. The company has temporarily reverted its terms of service to the previous version. The move came after Facebook polled its users as to whether it should revert to its previous terms.
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Recently, Facebook had changed its privacy policy which implied that the networking site would have perpetual rights to users' uploaded content. Initially Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried the calm the opposition by saying that users still owned the content. But the critism later spilled into a barrage of formal complaints and also a threat from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), demanding the social-networking service return to its previous terms.

"Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input.

Going forward, we've decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don't plan to leave it there for long." Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post late Tuesday.

In the blogpost, Zuckerberg also said that the company would be adopting a new set of terms that would more carefully take users' rights into consideration.
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"More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren't just a document that protect our rights; it's the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world. Given its importance, we need to make sure the terms reflect the principles and values of the people using the service," he added.

Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we'll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms."

Source Economic Times

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