After outraged users hammered Facebook for changing its terms-of-use policy to seemingly give the company vast control over users' content, analysts are wondering if the brouhaha will serve as the long-awaited wake-up call for users to think before they post.
"This just reflects the ongoing process of people trying to figure out the Internet," said John Byrne, a senior analyst at Technology Business Research. "The lesson that should be learned is that these content sites are not your own personal diaries. Consider it more as publishing and less about your personal circle of friends. People need to wake up."
Early Wednesday morning, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a blog telling users that the site is returning to its previous terms of service after upset users complained about changes unveiled earlier this month. Those changes, announced in a blog post on February 4, enabled Facebook to maintain broad control and archive data that users had deleted. Under the previous terms of use, Facebook was not granted any rights to deleted material.
Facebook, which announced last month it had hit a milestone of 150 million users, maintained earlier this week that users must agree to a license in order for the site to share their data with other people. That user agreement granted Facebook the right to use their content in a wide variety of ways.
The changes announced Wednesday removed two sentences reading: "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."
Many users had voiced concerns about Facebook giving itself the right to use content long deleted from someone's online profile. Could comments, written with little thought, come back to haunt someone years after they were written? Could photos of drunken college parties resurface long after they were forgotten?
Those fears led to a question over who controls the content -- the user or the site.
To nail down an answer, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a privacy watchdog group, said on Tuesday it was preparing to file a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over the social network's updated licenses.
Zuckerberg said in his blog post today that Facebook execs will take several weeks to come up with a new policy and to hash out the best language to explain it. "Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now," he wrote. "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."
