Since last Tuesday, there has been uproar among Facebook members. Out of the blue, Facebook secretly changed its terms of services. The new rules of Facebook basically says that they would own the content people posted on the site, even personal information after the person closed out their account.
And by the next morning, users who logged into their account receivied a posting that said that the site was going back to its previous terms of use policies while it resolves the issues.
Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, then created a group called "Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities." The group’s main focus was to inform users that Facebook "doesn't claim rights to any of your photos or other content. We need a license in order to help you share information with your friends, but we don't claim to own your information."
What should Facebook have done? If I were a member of Facebook’s PR department, I’d make sure that a public statement was issued about the changes to the terms of services. If they were going to change things, why do it in secrecy?
-Travis Francis
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ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting issue. The thing is, why change something like this in secret and go right back on your word? Of course at some point people were going to find out and be outraged. Now, as for the way the issue was handled? In my mind, nothing you put on the internet is owned by you once its posted, so I personally didn't care that much. I think that immediately reversing the policy without first issuing some face-saving explanation was not the smartest move, but the posting of the bill of rights was a good shot at transparency.
ReplyDeleteMandla Deskins
When I found about the change of terms and services on Facebook I was a little upset but not surprised. Like Mandla, I also think that once you put something on the Web it is no longer yours. That's why you need to be careful on what you put on there. As for Facebook, I think that they should have told it members first before they made any changes. It just showed that they didn't really think about their public and that's not a good thing. I think that it was a good idea to build a group explaining what was going on and they did post a comment on everyone's page Wednesday morning explaining themselves. I feel that they did a good job trying to recover from this incident. As a PR person, I would just make sure that next time they want to make a change they tell their publics first.
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