WTF Is Wrong with Facebook?
Dear Facebook,
WTF?
Love,
Ace
WTF Reason Number 1: Breast Feeding
Facebook has for a long time now allowed users to report inappropriate pictures. Many times people will report a picture of a women breastfeeding as inappropriate and Facebook will remove the picture. There is nothing inappropriate about a women breast feeding. The following Flickr image by gweggyphoto exemplifies what is wrong with Facebook’s anti-breastfeeding policy:
Image by gweggyphoto
WTF Reason Number 2: Terms of Service
Facebook recently changed their terms of service to the following:
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.
At the start of this week Facebook returned their terms of service to their original form and added back the following statement:
You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.
However this does not address the concern the majority of Facebook users still have. If you are an artist, poet, photographer, or just a regular person who does not want Facebook to use whatever pictures you upload or whatever you type on your friends’ walls for Facebook’s next commercial, then you are out of luck because Facebook’s current terms of service allows them to even sell you content to third parties. Scary huh? Hopefully, they get the message and their lawyers are working on solving this problem.
WTF Reason 3: Being Dicks to Families of the Recently Deceased
As Stephanie Bemister wrote Consumerist.com, Facebook does not allow you to remove dead relatives’ profiles even if you send their death certificate, are their next of kin, and have legal jurisdiction to do so. I smell a class action suit coming soon…
Facebook instead choses to memorialize the profiles and leave the wall open for anyone to say anything they’d like. Sounds like a good idea, but that should be left up to what the family’s wishes are. In Stephanie’s case, she is not even friends with her brother Bill Bemister whose profile she is trying to delete. He died before accepting her friend request. Stephanie’s daughters are constantly reminded that their uncle is dead due to his profile popping up in their home pages. Bill was a journalist who used Facebook more as a business device and did not know most of the people he is actually friends with. “Unfriending” Bill would cut his nieces completely off and they would not be able to see what people are putting on his profile.
It seems that what jrizos wrote on comments section may not be too far off: “Wait’ll she hears about the “memorial” book of his images and wall comments they’ll make available for just $19.95 (plus shipping).”
