Businesses should think twice about using Facebook

Pic by Nico Olwagen, under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 2.0 licence.

This is a concern to users who use Facebook as a personal social network but the kicker is how it affects businesses.

So why would a business use Facebook?

Most marketing people will tell you that Facebook offers businesses the opportunity to promote their products, services and brands to their fans using services such as Facebook Pages and Facebook Ads. They can tell you about how ads can be targeted at very specific groups of users and how a Facebook Page gives fans an opportunity to engage with the business and its brand in a variety of ways. There is little doubt that Facebook has a lot to offer businesses, as well as individual users, and it can open many doors. The catch is what you have to give away in the process.

Terms of use

Virtually every major online service includes a licence in its terms of use which you grant to that company. The licences are typically pretty broad and contain language along the lines of “perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through...”

For the most part, these licences are in place to enable the company to manipulate your content and continue to provide its service to its users. In other words, the licences enable companies such as YouTube and Flickr to take your content and display it to other users and otherwise allow them to do all the things they do with that content.

The licence Facebook takes from its users goes much further than simply enabling Facebook to provide its service to them.

For starters, you need to take a closer look at how Facebook defines key terms such as “User Content” and “Post” because these terms don't mean quite what you think they do. What is noteworthy about them is that they include content which users may link to from Facebook as well as “anything else that you Post on or through the Facebook Service”.

First problem

“Post” includes linking and sharing and here is the first problem. Often users may link to or share content outside Facebook and which they may either have licensed (or not) under a specific licence or the content belongs to someone else and the user just wants share it with friends. Facebook doesn't draw a distinction between these categories of content and this is a problem.

When you read the licence itself, you begin to appreciate just how objectionable the terms of use are.

The licence includes similar wording to the typical wording quoted above and then it goes on to not only license “User Content” you post but also any content you enable another user to “Post” (this includes “User Content” you may have published elsewhere and which a user may link to or share in his or her profile).

The licence even goes so far as to permit Facebook to use “your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising”. The licence ignores any existing licenses which may apply to your content which falls into this overly broad net.

Consider carefully

Businesses should carefully consider what “User Content” they “Post”. Their multimedia on their Facebook Page is in Facebook's hands, as is the content businesses may encourage their fans to share on their Page. What makes matters worse is that the licence persists despite a Page being taken down or a profile terminated. Once you fall into Facebook's net, you can never fully extricate yourself and your “User Content” endures on Facebook long after you are gone.


Listen to Paul Jacobson's brief commentary of some of the provisions of Facebook's terms of use.

For more:

• Webtechlaw.com: What Facebook's revised terms of use mean for your content [the nitty gritty of the terms of use]
  
• Webtechlaw.com: Can you trust Facebook? [privacy concerns]
  
• Webtechlaw.com: Can you trust Facebook? - part 2 [an analysis of its terms of use then in force]

• This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.5 ZA licence.

Update 18 February 2009: Facebook does about turn on terms of use