Facebook/Myspace Legal Agreements Analysis

In class today, my group and I looked up the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policies of Facebook and Myspace. These can be found here:

Facebook:
Terms and Conditions
Privacy Policy

Myspace:
Terms and Conditions
Privacy Policy

These statements, while sharing similarities (due primarily to the fact that they're both legal documents based on an... acceptable set of privacy standards), also naturally share some differences. For example, Facebook's privacy policy has been updated much more frequently. This is due, primarily, to the turbulent changes Facebook has seen over the past year, such as the implementation of a API for application development. This API can not only be used for application development, but it can also provide a backend for advertisers or other third parties to collect demographic information, among other tools that would prove to be useful in marketing/ad targeting. This means huge amounts of revenue for Facebook.

Nevertheless, Facebook does maintain a degree of user information control, primarily with the belief that one should hold full access control over their information.

1. You should have control over your personal information.

2. You should have access to the information others want to share.

In addition, according to Facebook's legal agreement, Facebook's license to use your personal information expires as soon as you remove the information from their site. They are still allowed to maintain a copy of your information, so, it's never truly gone. I can't imagine what use they have for this, but, they keep it anyway:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Myspace still makes a ton of money through gratuitious ad placement on nearly every square inch of their site. greater volume of profiles, as well as also tracking personal information for ad targeting.

MySpace.com also logs non-personally-identifiable information including IP address, profile information, aggregate user data, and browser type, from users and visitors to the site This data is used to manage the website, track usage and improve the website services. This non-personally-identifiable information may be shared with third-parties to provide more relevant services and advertisements to members.

Whenever you willingly submit information to the internet, there's no telling what may become of it. It could wind up anywhere, be proliferated and propagated as many times as whoever holds the information sees fit. This is the danger of the information age, which necessitates such privacy policies and terms of usage. Nevertheless, we must always remain vigilant of how large a window we open into our lives, available for the whole world to see.