The 50 Greatest Photo Ops

Everyone who’s on Facebook, raise your hand. Everyone who’s on Facebook and has read their terms of service raise your hand (mine was down too). Those of you sharing photos via your Facebook page should be aware that by uploading those images you have granted Facebook an unrestricted license to use your work in practically any way they see fit. See Attorney Carolyn Wright’s blog entry to read her take on this. 

Can Facebook use your images to promote their service? Yep. Can Facebook license your images to a third party to sell or promote a product? Yep. Can Facebook use your images to advance or promote a political or religious cause or viewpoint that goes against your personal opinion? Yep. Is there anything that Facebook cannot do with your images? Nope. Worse still, this grant of license does not expire when you remove images from your Facebook page or, I’m presuming unsubscribe (remember, you’re storing all this stuff on their servers). Oh, and the terms of service actually refers to “content”, so we’re talking about your words as well.

If you’re thinking, “This is just legalese. It doesn’t mean they’ll actually do it, plus they’re providing me with a free service. Every company has these kind of terms”, I say this: These terms don’t just magically appear. Someone in the legal dept. wrote them for a reason. And Automattic, owner of WordPress (which is also free) says the following in its TOS.

By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your Website, you grant Automattic a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog. If you delete Content, Automattic will use reasonable efforts to remove it from the Website, but you acknowledge that caching or references to the Content may not be made immediately unavailable.

If you’re using Facebook to promote your photography or simply uploading vacation pics, you may want to think long and hard about adding to your albums.

Update: See today’s NYTimes article for more info and Facebook’s initial response.