An Independent Game Developer’s Diary

So the baby is born, I’m low on sleep, and I’m trying to upload photo’s for everybody to see.

Even with sleep deprivation I worry about Facebook, I’ve considered a number times deleting my account as I worry about my privacy.  Facebook is not known for it’s good terms of service with regard to privacy.  Maybe the sleep deprivation is making me more paranoid, but I decided to check out the terms of use for FaceBook with regard to posting pictures, photo’s and other User Generated content.

What I found shocked me to the core, and means that I will be deleting my Facebook account permanantly and refusing to use it anymore (in about 7 days, I need to let everyone know).

The terms of service read

“When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to 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 (in whole or in part) 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, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.”

In english what this says is, When you put anything on facebook, you allow facebook to do anything with your stuff that they want to do, including advertising with it, and selling it as part of a commercial operation, and the ability to grant that exact same license to anybody else they want.

So if I upload a photo of my baby, and facebook decides to collect together a catalog of baby photos, sell them to any company that wants them, they can do so.

Flickr on the otherhand says “With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Service.”

Which basically says that when you upload your photo’s you get to decide if those photo’s are copyrighted and cant be used, or creative commons and can be used for say non-commercial purposes, or completely public and free for all. If you change ytour mind later and delete the phot, then Yahoo! will honour that decision.

You can find my flickr photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mibgames/