that’s a clumsy title, let me clear it up:
we’re now flooded with the idiot’s response to facebook’s change in TOS: the “legal disclaimer” disallowing facebook rights to your content simply because you posted a disclaimer. i love this concept–like you can change a contract by posting that you don’t agree with it. “i posted a denial of acceptance on facebook, so now i don’t have to make my car payment! I TRAPPED THEM WITH MY LEGALESE!”
anyway, for all the fear mongering and panic, i can’t recall a single incident of anyone being adversely effected by facebook’s privacy policies in any real-life incidents.
googling it is difficult, all you wind up with is 2,000,000 hits on why facebook TOS is something you SHOULD be scared of, not any news of anything ever actually happening.
has anything ever happened?
The example long ago was that Facebook would allow apps to use your profile photo for advertising. So you’d get some post on your time like that looked like “Want to play War of God Clans 4? Join your friends!” and it would have a picture of some of your friends. As I recall, there were two problems:
- Apps didn’t necessarily use the photo of someone that was using the app, so your photo might show up even if it’s an app you’ve never heard of.
- “Single and Looking” apps starting using photos of married people, much to their spouse’s, ah, annoyance.
I think Facebook has cleaned up their TOS to prevent this, but it was a worry for people at some point.
In theory, Facebook could start selling your images as stock photos - though its current TOS specifies that it can only use images for “a reasonable period” after they have been deleted from the site.
You can opt out of “social advertising” as FB calls it just by changing your privacy settings here.