Since yesterday, Facebook owns your content you published on Facebook and the content you link on, on Facebook. They removed a tiny section in their terms of service and changed somes lines. It now states:
You hereby grant Facebook 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), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.
[...]
The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.
All your content on Facebook now is owned by Facebook even after account termination. You gave it away, for free, without probably even knowing it. Well it isn't a new phenomon. Facebook already owned your content till the moment you decided to terminate your account. Something identical happens at LinkedIn, LinkedIn can use your content for commercial use.
Each User grants LinkedIn a license to use the content supplied by each such User for the purposes of disclosure on the LinkedIn website.
This license includes, inter alia, the right for LinkedIn to reproduce, represent, adapt, translate, digitize, use for advertising purposes, whether commercial or non-commercial, to sublicense or to transfer the content concerning each User (including information, pictures, descriptions, search criteria, etc.) over all or part of the Services and/or in any mailings of LinkedIn and in general through any electronic communication media (email, SMS, MMS, WAP, Internet, CD Rom or DVD).
If you are user of Facebook and LinkedIn you'll probably never noticed these sentences in the TOS, or you did not care. The service PatientsLikeMe provides a platform on which patients can share their personal health data. 'Patients embrace the open sharing of personal health data because they believe that information can change the course of their disease'.
Do you like the barter you have with Facebook and with LinkedIn? People participating in PatientsLikeMe thinks it is worth to share their personal health data. It adds value for them and for medical institutes, it provides new insights that would not have been discovered if people did not share their information.
What do you want to give away to get some value out of a service?
Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious
