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Bill Gates had once said: “The Internet will help achieve ‘friction free capitalism’ by putting buyer and seller in direct contact & providing more information to both about each other.” He was wrong, and Facebook (where the company he founded, Microsoft, bought a 1.5% stake at a whopping $240 million) proved him so! ‘More information’; but that special power has only been granted to the ‘seller’ for now...

Today, Facebook is doubling its base of users every month (as per Fortune), and while this may sound great to all at the company, this very swelling base (which is currently estimated to touch about 175 million) might just revolt in the latest development at the networking giant! And what’s the crime? Privacy! Apparently, Facebook intends to capitalise on the wealth of information it has about its users. On February 4, 2009, Facebook changed its ‘Terms of Services’ announcing its self-proclaimed proprietorship on ‘your total account content’, even if you deactivate/delete your currently existent Facebook account. And this is how the new policy reads: “You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content; ” not really great news for Facebook fans arond the world!

Very clearly activists around the world are interpreting that the changes in ‘terms and conditions’ means that the ‘change’ means that “anything you upload on Facebook can be used by Facebook in anyway it deems fit; forever, no matter what you do later...” There’s more – Facebook also reserves the right of user content usage for ‘promotional reasons’. As per Facebook: “By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant... to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, |copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works...”

This speculation that the site (launched by college-goers, but now turned profit-lovers) would sell user data to third parties or would incorporate users’ words or images in commercial material led to an uprising that forced Zuckerberg to apologise within a week of the change in terms event. Currently, Facebook is working on revision the above stated terms (through user feedback, it claims), but how far will the real ‘implications’ be altered? Now that is questionable!

The latest Facebook controversy has prompted social networking lovers to scrutinize user policies of other social networking sites too, like Twitter, YouTube and MySpace. Twitter Claims no intellectual property rights over the material users provide and does not retain copies of deleted messages too. The Google-owned video-sharing service, YouTube says “you retain all your ownership rights.” YouTube retains copies of videos for a certain period of time after they are removed, but promises not to “display, distribute, or perform” deleted videos. In MySpace users “continue to retain” their rights subject to a “limited license” that gives MySpace the right to display and distribute it on MySpace, but the site also allows users to permanently delete content from their account.

Whatever Facebook does hereon matters little. It is already a hit in the social circles and will continue garnering revenues and enjoying a growing flock of visitors. But one warning has just been publicised here – social networking sites are certainly not personal diaries!