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Facebook Will Always Own You
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5963299/facebook-will-always-own-you
Bad news: the “copyright notice” you’ve been reading (and sharing, ugh) is completely bogus and a waste of everyone’s time. Facebook owns the photos, videos, and statuses you upload, and that’s not going to change just because you say so.
But here’s something you can do that might actually make a difference.
When you signed up for Facebook, you agreed to Facebook’s Terms of Service (ToS). These are the rules you agree to play by so long as you use Facebook, period. They’re Facebook’s rules. Odds are you didn’t bother reading the ToS before you signed up, because Facebook was new and exciting and who ever reads that stuff anyway? No one does.
Half a decade or so later, we’re still bound by those rules—and that means that, despite all the hoaxes floating around today that might tell you otherwise, Facebook owns the pictures and videos you share. And you can’t opt out, ever, because you agreed to this:
(I’ll bold the important parts)
Your Content and Information
You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:
For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).
In short: if you upload a photo, Facebook is 100%, completely allowed to use it (or sell it) until you delete that photo or delete your account. This isn’t to say that it does any of this stuff—and in fact Facebook is adamant that it does not—just reserving the right to at some point in the future.
But those rules aren’t written in stone. Instead of posting pointless copyright notices, to your timeline, try something that might actually get something done. Say you don’t want the photos you take of your private life to be potentially sold by a company with shareholders whose interests aren’t yours. Say you object specifically to the wording of Section 2.1 of the Facebook ToS:
The photos, videos, thoughts, and all other intellectual property I create should remain mine unless I tell Facebook they can own it. Facebook should remove section 2.1 from its Terms of Service, terminating its “transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post.” Short of this, I should be allowed to opt-out of this agreement with Facebook.
Ask your friends to like and comment (or even share) if they agree.
Or better yet, send it to Facebook customer service.
It’s a longshot, but at the very least you’ll be sharing a sentiment that’s not pure misinformation and naïveté. Sharing fake copyright BS is an annoyance. Sharing a sincere grievance isn’t. But remember: until anything changes, Facebook will own the text of your grievance in full.
Remember When Facebook Wanted Your Phone Number For ‘Security’? It’s Using It To Sell Ads (FB)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-phone-number-security-being-sold-to-advertisers-2012-11
Since about September, Facebook has offered its advertisers a powerful new way to track its users as they surf the web: It’s called “phone number retargeting.” The move came after Facebook made a big effort to collect its users’ mobile phone numbers to prevent security breaches.
More recently, according to AdExchanger, Facebook has combined phone retargeting with a new “conversion pixel” — a type of tracking device, basically — within ads displayed on Facebook.
The combination of phone retargeting and conversion pixels allows advertisers to target you directly with ads and then measure exactly how you respond to them, whether by clicking, ignoring or buying something from the advertiser’s site.
Some advertisers have been doing this kind of thing on other web sites for years.
But most Facebook users don’t know it’s going on within Facebook. Instead, they believe the primary reason Facebook prompts them for a mobile phone number is to prevent account hacking, and to allow users to upload photos and make status updates from their phones.
In fact, earlier this year, Facebook began asking every user for a phone number for “security” purposes. Here’s what Facebook says about that:
But Facebook has since made those phone numbers available t! o advert isers as part of its new Custom Audience targeting product. “Audiences can be defined by either user email address, Facebook UIDs, or user phone numbers,” the product states.
Here’s how it works: Let’s say you are a member of your local gym. You probably gave the gym your phone number. But then you let your membership lapse, and now the gym wants to persuade you to come back. The gym can cross-reference its list of members’ phone numbers with users’ phone numbers on Facebook, and serve an ad on the page of any user with a matching number. Suddenly, you’re seeing ads that say, “Get 10% off if you rejoin your local gym!”
If you click on that ad, a conversion pixel will enable a “cookie” to track what you do so that the gym can see how successful its campaign was.
There’s a level of privacy built in to the system: Although your phone number will be targeted by ads, the number will be “hashed,” meaning that the system disguises it by replacing it with random code, making you anonymous. So the gym might target 100 phone numbers, but it won’t know which of those specific people actually responded to the ad (until they pay for a membership online, of course). All the gym will know is that a certain number responded to the ad, and that those users must have been on the original phone list.
Facebook launched the system to make its ads more effective for advertisers. The company believes they lower cost-per-acquisition (of users) for advertisers by 40 percent.
Disclosure: The author owns Facebook stock.
Related: Here Are The Sealed Court Papers On ‘Invalid Clicks’ Facebook Doesn’t Want You To See
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Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights. 
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