A note on manually-posted Facebook privacy declarations: You might see your great-aunt posting about it, but like many things on the internet, it’s as fake as a Kim Kardashian photoshoot. It’s an old hoax, in fact, but now that Facebook is updating their privacy terms, it seems to be coming back.
It might read something like this: “I declare that my rights are attached to all my personal data drawings, paintings, photos, video, texts etc…. published on my profile and my page. For commercial use of the foregoing my written consent is required at all times.” It might warn you that “If you have not published this statement at least once, you tacitly allow the use of elements such as your photos as well as the information contained in the profile update.” It will probably urge you to copy, paste, and share it immediately.
Except that’s not really how contracts work. You can’t retroactively declare the terms of your agreement with Facebook with a random post on your wall that Mark Zuckerberg is definitely not reading, any more than you could do that with your landlord. When you sign up for Facebook, you agree to Facebook’s terms, and that’s that.
The good news is that Facebook already doesn’t claim to own your property. “You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your settings,” Facebook states in its Terms of Service.
By posting content on their site, you do give Facebook limited rights to use things you post, depending on your privacy settings. But you retain ownership, and copyright law already applies to you.
None of this is to say that Facebook’s new Terms of Service are benign. Buried in its “Data Policy” section, away from the main privacy page, Facebook reveals that they can share your location with friends or target ads for your area: “We may put together your current city with GPS and other location information we have about you to, for example, tell you and your friends about people or events nearby, or offer deals to you in which you might be interested.”
“Individuals will be able to allow their friends to track their every move,” a privacy lawyer recently explained to Vice. “So users can now inadvertently agree to sign away their privacy rights, implications of which they may not be aware of.”
If that makes you nervous about putting information on Facebook, you’re certainly not alone. Most Americans do not think their data is safe online. Yet at the same time, few actually take extra precautions to secure their information.
The reason for that is probably the same reason so many fall for the privacy notice hoax. Nobody has time to do things like read the whole Terms of Service, or go sleuthing around for ways to encrypt their data.
Ultimately, the only thing you can do to ensure Facebook doesn’t give your pics to the NSA or track down where you live is to delete your Facebook. Edward Snowden would have your back on that one—he’s called Facebook, Dropbox, and Google all “dangerous services” to be avoided.
