| | |  Editorials | February 2009 
Lives on the Net
 Le Monde
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| | Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has had to backtrack on rights to content posted to the site. (BusinessWeek) | |
Storm of panic in the global digital village! This village, where, thanks to the Internet and to "social networks," anyone and everyone may recount their life story, their tastes, their crushes, their tantrums - in short, where everyone may virtually meet and get to virtually know everyone else.
A storm of panic ever since the first of these social networks, Facebook, furtively decided two weeks ago to modify its site's terms of use. Whoever subscribes to the site contractually cedes to the company the "irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license" to use all the content the user posts there. Unless the subscriber explicitly requests, at any time, to be unsubscribed. It's this concept of the "right of removal" that Facebook wanted to eliminate by appropriating to itself perpetual usage rights for all the data it gathers.
In the face of the outcry, in the United States and then in Europe, the network's young boss, Mark Zuckerberg, was smart enough to backtrack. Even better: on the company's blog, he has just promised a simplification of the terms of use and called on users to help him redefine them. User trust is far too vital a driver for a site like this to risk destabilizing it.
The inherent contradiction of this mode of communication remains: subscribing to Facebook, as with any similar site, assumes that one has chosen to put all or some part of one's private life into the public domain. Not only for a short time or for a chosen circle of "friends," but - quite the opposite - in quasi-permanence for an ever broader circle of users, and, specifically, for advertisers who work hand-in-glove with these social network sites.
All persons have their own calling. Facebook's - and that of its homologues - is to find the means to economic viability and to propose models to which subscribers as well as advertisers agree. The borderless citizen's is to establish a personal limit between private and public life, with complete knowledge of the circumstances: that assumes, in one way or another, both information and education. It is up to governments, finally, to invent a regulatory framework capable of guaranteeing privacy and personal data protection as applied over the long term to a digital reality undergoing constant development and dazzling growth. Obviously, such an approach assumes some form of international regulation.
Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher. |
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