

Facebook TOS vote a con trick? - knightinblue
http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-564312

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jballanc
Facebook is a _website_ , not a state or any other sort of political entity.
Why people seem to feel that they have "rights" when it comes to facebook is
beyond me. I wonder if those complaining are the same people that keep yelling
about bailout money and saying that "the market should correct itself"?

Funny how market correcting forces don't seem so pleasant when you're caught
in the middle of one of those corrections...

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knightinblue
You're comparing apples to oranges.

Facebook is a website that _hosts your personal info_. Whats more, they want
to _store_ that info for as long as they want and use it for whatever they
want, besides making money.

If facebook was a site that didn't store any info about you, then they can do
whatever they want and I'd be willing to bet that nobody would care. But it's
not. So yes, we _do_ have rights when it comes to this stuff. Which was
explicitly displayed when people began to close their facebook accounts.

~~~
tptacek
They didn't take your personal info. You gave it to them, because you like
what they do with it. I'm sorry, but I think you're going to find that you
don't actually have "rights" here.

~~~
knightinblue
Sweet Lord grant me the strength.

The whole reason why we _posted_ (notice I didn't say give, we didn't give
them anything) our info was because of the inherent understanding that they
wouldn't do anything stupid with it. Like saving it forever ever even after we
want to delete it.

And once again, like I mentioned in my first comment, once this trust was
breached, people exercised their _right_ (yes, we do have rights here) to
delete their accounts.

Bottom line - if they want to use our info to market ads towards us, fine, the
site is expensive to run and I can certainly understand and support their
efforts, for as long as I maintain my info there. It's an equal give and take
- I use the site and they make money off my info. But once I delete my info,
it's only common sense for them to delete it all as well. How is this so hard
to understand?

~~~
tptacek
No offense, but that was dumb of you. You will never get that information
back. You might as well organize a protest in front of Experian. You had no
contract with Facebook requiring them to do anything at all with your
information once you left.

~~~
knightinblue
You're right. There was no contract. It was based on a silly thing called
trust. It _was_ dumb of me to blindly trust them. No argument there. Lesson
learned.

I know now that when I launch my startup, my focus will be on maintaining
customer trust. The first question I will ask myself when it comes to any
changes will be "can I achieve the desired outcome without hurting my
userbase?"

Facebook taught me that.

~~~
blader
'The first question I will ask myself when it comes to any changes will be
"can I achieve the desired outcome without hurting my userbase?"'

Judging from their growth rate, it looks like they asked that question and the
answer was yes.

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ivank
After voting, I see:

"More than 280,597 people have voted.

73.16% (for the proposed documents)

26.84% (for the existing documents)"

~~~
keopi
What percentage of total users does that add up to?

~~~
tlrobinson
Assuming 200 million active users, 0.14%

(<http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics>)

