According to James Potter, “Social networking web sites are designed to give all kinds of people the means to connect with others for all sorts of reasons (pg. 214).” Some use it to chat with friends, post pictures or comments, even share ideas and videos. But do the social networks own everything we post?
In a video posted by MoneyTalksNews entitled Social Networking Sites Own You, they have found just that. By reading the user agreements of social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, They have found that almost all of the sites have some sort of ownership clause in their user agreement. LinkedIn had the worst by far, claiming any and all things posted on their site belonged to them despite whether or not an account has been deleted. Twitter on the other hand, took no ownership of anything posted on their site. While on the surface this may seem like a potential user may just have to be more selective of which site they use, in actuality things are worse than that. What makes things worse is the fact that any social networking site has the ability to change its user agreements anytime they want which means that they can take ownership at any time.
Let’s think about this, people post all kinds of things on their respective social networking sites. We post pictures, conversations, videos, songs, everything important to us. Most of us also do not read the user agreements before we sign up, which means that we are practically giving away everything about ourselves that we post to the site we post it on. This makes me think; maybe these “free” sites are not as free as we are led to believe. I mean, at what price do we value ourselves?
If a site does not have an ownership clause, that can spell disaster in the future.
ReplyDeleteAs I mentioned on one of Daniel's articles, the clauses are usually with the user at heart and the company is just attempting to protect themselves. Without these clauses you can suffer some serious legal trouble.
It's really over exaggerated. What will Facebook do to me that I should be so careful to avoid? At the most I think it can be a source of libel in the future.