If you have a Facebook account, it might interest you to know that upon agreeing to their Terms of Service, you have less authority over “yourself” than they do. This clever info-graphic laden short, by Vishal Agarwala, will give you a bit more caution with your dealings with Facebook. And the site can be quite addicting, indeed.
November 1, 2007 at 3:10 pm |
Now that is scary.
November 2, 2007 at 5:23 pm |
Some of the claims from the TOS are pretty benign and wouldn’t exactly hold up in court. Stuff like they can access information from you based on newspapers and IM conversations, regardless of whether you access the site or not. What? If im not accessing the site then I’m not beholden to the TOS, clear and simple. And yeah, they can get info on me from newspapers, but so can anyone with my name, not that I’m ever in a newspaper, but still. And for AIM, well, that’d go directly against the TOS that every AIM user has agreed to with AOL – they’d have to be logging every conversation. Even then if you’re really worried about it, you just encrypt your AIM conversations – then no one is getting at it but the recipient.
My point is, yeah, theres some silly shit in the TOS. But there always is. And just because I can go through 3-4 people to get back to the CIA doesnt mean Facebook is in cahoots with the CIA. The only step there that matters is that facebook got VC money. And if you know anything about how VC money gets spread around, you’d realize how the further connections are absolutely meaningless.
You want a stronger correlation? Heres a one-step correlation with Vishal Agarwala – the 3-4 web 2.0 companies that hes directly affiliated with. I’m glad he brought up the concerns, because they are important – protecting your information online is important. But facebook being evil? Thats downright stupid, and when you’re basically in competition for branding and users in the web 2.0 universe…it starts sounding like his person views start to cloud reality.