By Lisa DiCarlucci

Last week, Facebook.com became the subject of a huge controversy when they quietly changed their terms of service to give them a more specific ownership over the content which users have on their pages. The controversial part is that this includes post-deletion of your page.

Despite terminating your account, Facebook would still have rights over what you had published. The change in terms was as follows: “You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sub license) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your Web site and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.”

After an uproar of protests, petitions, and Facebook groups from users against what was seen as a deliberate invasion of privacy, the Facebook administrators decided to change the terms of service back to the previous one which included a line that says, “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.”

While I am thankful that the terms of service have been changed back, I was pretty horrified by the attempt to claim ownership over my information. My immediate reaction was a feeling of violation. Upon further thought though, I realized that I could only be so angry; I had never read the terms of service in the first place.

And this is something that we are all guilty of sometimes. When signing up for something like Facebook or Twitter, or installing a new program on your computer and all that stands between you and this new piece of technology is a seemingly eternal terms of service agreement, which you have to agree to anyway, so you just check the ” I agree” box.

In retrospect, it’s almost ridiculous to think that I wouldn’t be at all interested in what I may or may not be agreeing to for a Web site which I am will be posting a lot of personal information on and displaying many of my social interactions.

Everyone was pretty appalled with the terms change, but if you hadn’t bothered to read them in the first place, how could you be too upset? Understandably, we are all concerned with who can see and use our personal information but let’s keep in mind that the fact that we are publishing this information to the web in the first place means that we are sacrificing certain privacies.

Let’s face it, if the change in the terms of service hadn’t been publicized by an article on consumerist.com, we probably never would have even known.

I’m not saying that these terms are right and I think it is completely unfair for Facebook to make such an important change without formally informing all users. However, I do think that the terms of service aren’t that great either way, but yet the access to Facebook overrides our sense of privacy.

Personally, this change of service didn’t make me angry but made me take a good look at what rights I am willing to give up just so I can write on someone’s wall or check my news feed.

Lisa DiCarlucci is a sophomore print journalism student. You may e-mail her at

ldicar1@pride.hofstra.edu.