Earlier this week, Facebook changed its Terms of Service removing a key phrase from it.

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.

This brought about a lot of complaints from the user community as it touches on a pretty big gray area and can be interpretted in different ways. The tech community, who is obviously much more familiar with how these terms of service statements work saw this as Facebook trying to sneak in a way for Facebook to retain and keep ownership of any and all user content submitted to the site, and judging on how Facebook has acted in the past, the community's beliefs were not out of line either. What this change meant was that Facebook made it seem like they could take any content posted through Facebook profiles as their own to use as they see fit. If you ran your blog through Facebook, the terms of use made it theoretically possible to use the content of your blog posts as their own.

After the change, The Consumerist as well as many other blogs brought this change up alerting people to this controversial change and then the backlash began. Users became irate and became very skeptical of facebook wondering what they were up to with this change and what the change really meant. The outcry was so loud that Mark Zuckerberg wrote a blog post to try to clear the air.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

Now while it was nice of him to come out and try to help people understand the changes, he really didn't say much and his response still was well within that gray area that didn't quell anyone's fears.

Well, now thanks to the outcry, Facebook has reverted back to its previous Terms of Service; at least for now. Nothing stops them however from a month down the road, doing the same thing again. The tech community can chalk this up as a win, but was it just a battle? Or was it the war? My bet is it was just a battle. But this brings up a bigger, more age-old question.

In social networking, what really is privacy, and what really is "your" data. Truth is, there really is no true privacy on the internet. Sure you can protect your facebook profile which will probably shield you from most, but if someone wants to see your profile, they can find a way. Once you post something to the internet, its up there essentially forever. You can take it down, but if someone already grabbed a copy, they now have it to post wherever they want and you now have no control over it.

This is something to always note, with the popularity of facebook and the number of people using it, you wonder how many are fully aware of these terms of service and what they mean. Us in the more technical crowd know the ramifications of posting content and what that means in respect to facebook. The 15 and 16 year olds on facebook may not which can cause problems for them.

I deleted my facebook account a while back and still haven't looked back, I was not a fan of where facebook was heading and now it looks like I made a wise decision. All the more reason to remain vigilant of what you post, where you post it, and what that site's terms are. It's better to be safe than sorry as to not get yourself burned down the road.