Zuckerberg On Who Owns User Data On Facebook: It’s Complicated
When Facebook recently changed its terms of service to no longer allow users to delete their data when they leave the service, it justifiably created an uproar. Just what is Facebook planning to do with this data, and isn’t it mine to delete if I wish. In a blog post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tries to calm everyone down.
Essentially, he says that the issues are not so cut and dry. When you share your data with someone else, whether it be an email or a photo, it becomes their data as well. You cannot normally rescind data you share with other people in an e-mail. So why should a social network be any different? Zuckerberg explains:
Zuckerberg is saying, "Trust us." But it is difficult to trust a company that is stripping users of rights they’ve become accustomed to, even if hardly any of them ever actually asserted those rights in practice. And the principle that you should be able to delete your data from the Facebook service is one that many would argue trumps the good that is done by letting Facebook keep it. If I upload a picture which I later regret uploading, why shouldn’t I be able to erase it from Facebook forever, even if some of my friends have already seen it? And should there be different rules for different media? Most people consider the messages in their inbox to be theirs, even if the sender wishes they’d never sent it? And as this data is shared beyond Facebook across the Web, who controls what becomes even harder to determine.
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