Users Face-Off With Facebook

If you’re like millions of people, you post the occasional — or perhaps the frequent — baby photo, family portrait, newsy bit — or 25 — on Facebook for the appreciation of your “friends.”

Since its new terms of service came online a few weeks ago, Facebook has been dodging and ducking accusations of stealing users’ data. The new terms stated that not only does Facebook own and control anything you put on the site, it owns and controls anything you ever put on the site, even after you’ve taken it down.

After listening to the outcry, Facebook has responded by temporarily returning to its original terms (in which they only own what you’ve actually posted while it’s posted), and has opened a page for taking users’ suggestions for what the terms of service should be.

I am a Facebook user, as are many of the people I know. I’m also a personal blogger as well as a Babble blogger and I have an additional website on which I’ve published writing and photography.

With that in mind, here’s my philosophy on web privacy and ownership: if you put it on the Internet, it’s out of your hands. I have copyright statements on my web pages and I would be properly annoyed if I found my work used somewhere without permission, but I have come to accept that it may be, and there’s precious little I can do about it.

While I appreciate the attempts of sites like Facebook to try and please their users (or appease them, as the case may be), I am fairly cynical about the whole thing. I assume that everything from email to blog posts to photo albums will end up in places I never imagined or intended them to and I edit myself accordingly.

What’s your strategy for web privacy?