Rights, permanence and social media
Friday, 20 February, 2009 — design social+media
There was quite the brouhaha over Facebook changing their terms of service, as noted this past weekend on Consumerist, including a response from Facebook. It’s worth exploring why a social media site, like Facebook or Flickr would want permanent rights to member-provided comments, photos and such.
Now, I’m not talking about outright ownership. A social media service should never claim ownership over member contributions. Instead, I’m presuming the social media service’s — let’s call it LOLChatz for purposes of this article — terms of service are “requesting” a perpetual non-exclusive license to whatever members post. Comments, blog entries, ratings and photos all qualify.
Why permanence is a good thing
One scenario that seems to upset people is leaving the service, and LOLChatz getting to keep whatever you’ve done forever. If you leave, you should be able to take it all with you. Right? Not so fast.
Unless you were a strict lurker on LOLChatz, you created content that other people commented on. You added some forum postings, tagged some things, took a poll and commented on a few posts from someone else. In particular, you got into a pretty serious religious discussion that made your head hurt and has your mother calling to ask questions. Can’t LOLChatz just delete what you wrote when the hangover wears off and you decide to close your account? They can, but it’s harmful.
Back at BarCampRDU in August, 2007, Luis Villa led a session on open web services. One of the key points of discussion revolved around the question, “Should you be able to remove yourself completely from a Web 2.0 if you decide to take your data and go home?” My answer, from my notes:
In the same way as not being able to unattend a party after the fact, you shouldn’t be able to pretend you didn’t participate in an online conversation. Contributions to a discussion should be permanent. You can, however, decide to not go to any future parties. There’s tension between the individual ownership at stake and the fact that the data also belongs to the community. Such is the value of social networking. So, having the freedom to leave is different than having the freedom to delete.
For example, if you were to have a back and forth with another member, then closed your account, if everything you did went away, you’ve just made a hash of the forum or comment thread you were participating in. Important context is now missing and that makes follow-up responses misleading. Not having those responses disappear helps keep things honest. So do notices indicating that a comment has been edited.
I partially like how Flickr handles account closure and image deletion. If you leave, you can delete your photos on the way out. But, I don’t like that when you delete a photo, if you’ve copied that photo into a comment thread or group forum, the comment displays an “Image No Longer Available” message where the photo used to be 1. That’s something of an edge case, though. What about simple departure and account termination? In that situation, comments and forum postings stick around, but the account avatar indicates the user is no longer an active member. This, I think, is partly what Facebook was trying to explicitly allow themselves to do with their terms of service change. It’s also feasible they were trying to improve on Flickr by reserving rights for photographs 2.
Defining what’s allowed isn’t the same as explaining it
What this really gets at is setting the expectation that you can’t come to a party, add rum to the punchbowl, then unmake the punch when you’ve decided you’ve had enough and want nothing more to do with the people you’re drinking with. What you can do is stop drinking and leave. How a site establishes this understanding with members is where trouble creeps in, mainly because they aren’t creating that understanding. Yes, the legal language in the terms of service needs to allow for it. But legalese can really invite some language parsing of, “well, they’re not keeping themselves from doing it, so they can do it.” I presume there’s a gap between what the legal team drafted and what the management team intends to do. This gap needs to be filled with a straight-forward, non-legalese introduction.
Creative Commons fills this what might otherwise be an expectation gap admirably. Check out the full legal terms for the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 U.S. license. There’s approximately 2,250 words to the license, without the supporting material that says Creative Commons isn’t your lawyer. There’s a lot of very specific language in terms of what’s allowed, not allowed and under what conditions. It’s likely more that most people are going to chose to read completely.
Now, look at what Creative Commons shows users when they click on a Creative Commons licensing logo. It’s a very easy-to-digest summary of what the license allows and the responsibilities that go with it. But that’s not all that it does. It also guides a reading of the full legal text, if you want to go there. You go in reading and looking for language that allows you to do what the summary indicates you can. Having that introduction in place blunts the impact of finding what otherwise might be scary clauses in the terms of service. There’s a further benefit if the terms of service legal language changes. If the explanation acknowledges the changes and says, “this is what the changes allows us to do and here’s how it protects you,” that’s a lot better just having the diff to try and divine intent from.
That sort of explanation and introduction is precisely how a site like Facebook should introduce their terms of service and future changes. I’d like to see Apple do the same thing with the Apple iTunes store terms of service, too.
Explaining permanence (and other things) in human terms
How should a social media site summarize legal language that allows it to keep and display a copy of anything added to the service? Here’s my attempt:
Q: Who can see my content on LOLChatz?
A: Any member of LOLChatz can see content you mark as “members-only”. Anyone on the Internet can see content you mark as “public.”
Q: How do I close my account?
A: Go to your account page and click the link labeled, “Close my account.”
Q: Does my content go away if I close my account?
A: No. Content that you’ve added to LOLChatz does not expire and will be available on LOLChatz permanently. We want to keep member conversations complete, and it wouldn’t be complete without what you’ve added.
Q: Will you ever use my stuff in ads or anything?
A: We highlight conversational threads we like on the LOLChatz blog and we may highlight yours. If we’re interested in using a post or photograph in our marketing or advertising, we will ask for your permission.
Q: Is this the legal agreement?
A: No. The specific legal language you want is at http://example.com/tos
- With obvious exceptions for things libelous, inappropriate, etc. ↺
- I have no way of knowing Facebook’s actual intent, so I’m trying to thing of a neutral explanation for the terms of service. It might be that the terms of service change would enable them to make t-shirts of your kitten photos, no matter how long ago you quit Facebook, and they were ready to reactivate Beacon to let your friends know. ↺