Facebook has hit back over a privacy row on its site, warning users that copying and pasting on their wall the legal wording currently doing the rounds will do nothing to change the copyright status of their content.
The move coincides with new fears that the social networking site’s stated intention to share data with Instagram will lead to a deluge of spam as well as compromise users’ rights.
The viral message first appeared earlier this year, but over the past week thousands of the site’s users have pasted the copyright legalese in response to claims that Facebook has silently modified its terms and conditions to take full control of all its users’ personal data and content. It includes the phrase: “In response to the new Facebook guidelines I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, illustrations, comics, paintings, professional photos and videos, etc. (as a result of the Berner Convention).”
Facebook has now issued a statement of its own on the matter, dismissing the message as a ‘meme’ – a term used to refer to content spread from person to person on the Internet, typically without fact-checking.
Facebook said: “There is a rumour circulating that Facebook is making a change related to ownership of users’ information or the content they post to the site. This is false. Anyone who uses Facebook owns and controls the content and information they post, as stated in our terms. They control how that content and information is shared. That is our policy, and it always has been.”
However, two online privacy groups have responded to Facebook’s published intentions to share its data with recently-acquired Instagram, as well as eliminate a user voting system and relax restrictions on who can email users with unsolicited material.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) have written to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The letter reminds Zuckerberg that, in 2009, Facebook agreed to introduce a user voting system that meant if 7,000 users voted against a certain proposed motion in the site’s governance, the motion would not be able to go ahead.
It argues that, “although Facebook’s existing voting mechanism set an unreasonably high participation threshold, scrapping the mechanism altogether raises questions about Facebook’s willingness to take seriously the participation of users”.
It also questions Facebook’s mention of “replacing the ‘Who can send you Facebook messages’ setting with new filters for managing incoming messages”.
“Facilitating spam violates users’ privacy and security, as many Facebook scams are accomplished through the messaging feature,” the groups argue.
