I've always been a bit uncomfortable with Facebook's terms of service. Well, I shouldn't say "always". The first few weeks were a pure love affair. I was charmed by it, estatic about how much fun and addicting it was. But as the novelty began to fade, and I began to learn more about the stakeholders behind Facebook, I had second thoughts about our relationship. I regretted the fact that I had originally told Facebook what real birth date was. Although I later "removed" it, I knew it would be stupid and naive to think that it no longer existed in the database archives.

This bout of paranoia led me to investigate the terms of service and privacy policies of the social networking site. A single sentence was all I needed to read which said by adding content to Facebook I was granting them an "irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) 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), [...]"

I thought "Woah, that's pretty creepy". I started pointing this out to my Facebook friends who were building a portfoloios of semi-professional photography. I encouraged them to at least watermark or tag the images with some text to at least give them credit if the images were ever republished by Facebook.

I then went on a bit of a haitis with Facebook, but came back occasionally, usually when I recieved emails about new friend requests from folks that I hadn't heard from in years--which is what I really love about the site.

Fast forward to now...Facebook has probably doubled, or tripled in the number of users since then. It seems like everyone is inside the Facebook now.

So the stakes are higher and everytime they make a bad policy move, they are mobbed with protestors. It's great; it keeps them in check.

This week they announced some positive changes (summarized here by PC World), which I hope will be a part of an ongoing trend.

But after all, they are just a corporation who needs to make money (and apparently aren't doing a good job of that), so I still doubt that being socially responsible is their number one priority.