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Facebook attempts to abate hysteria over photo rights
There has been mass hysteria over the changes in the Facebook terms and conditions, which has led to allegations that Facebook is going to sell your personal photos - probably to the porn industry, where your head will be superimposed onto another person's body so it looks as though you are providing manual relieve to a horse, or similar farm creature. Even after you have deleted your account and set up your anti-Facebook protest.
Well the truth is nowhere near as exciting. Besides the fact that photos uploaded to Facebook are of such low resolution that they would be impossible to syndicate, social networks rely on the trust their users have that their information will not be shared indiscriminately.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been forced to issue several responses to the media furore and return to the original phrasing of the Terms and Conditions.
The problem is a combination of sloppy legal writing and the fact that there is no formal precident for privacy law in a social networking environment - where you want to keep your profile private, but also connect with new friends and share your personal information with all of those friends, or some of them to varying degrees. Clearly in real life this is how we behave, but we have not Terms and Conditions when we meet someone in a bar and we give them our number or our address. They could do whatever they wish with those details and we'd have no control over it. But in a social networking environment these sorts of things need to be formalised.
For the time being, Facebook is asking its users to help shape the new Terms and Conditions.
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