From Gmail’s about privacy info. Nice and honest, but a little one the defensive side?

——-

Conclusion

Let’s be clear: there are issues with email privacy, and most of these issues are common to all email providers. The main issue is that the contents of your messages are stored on mailservers for some period of time; there is always a danger that these messages can be obtained and used for purposes that may harm you, such as possible misuse of your information by governments, as well as by your email provider. Careful consideration of the relevant issues, close scrutiny of email providers’ practices and policies, and suitable vigilance and enforcement of appropriate legislation are the best defenses against misuse of your information. We encourage users and interested groups around the world to share their thoughts on our policies and procedures by writing to us at privacymatters+gmail@google.com.

Back to top

Facebook have updated their Terms of Use.

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. 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. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

Copyright has at once gotten more muddled but perhaps better for users. My reading is that I still own my content, but offer them a license to do whatever I want with it (which would include selling it!). Better, I guess….but still looking for other options.

As a follow-up to my [Last Post](http://jimdelaney.net/?p=181 “Facebook and copyright”), you may want to take a look at Twitter’s much more enlightened (and easier to read) copyright, from their [Terms of Service](http://twitter.com/tos “Terms of Service”)

–SNIP–

Copyright (What’s Yours is Yours)

1. We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.
2. We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.
3. Twitter undertakes to obey all relevant copyright laws. We will review all claims of copyright infringement received and remove content deemed to have been posted or distributed in violation of any such laws. To make a claim, please provide us with the following:
1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or the person authorized to act on its behalf;
2. A description of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed;
3. A description of the infringing material and information reasonably sufficient to permit Twitter to locate the material;
4. Your contact information, including your address, telephone number, and email;
5. A statement by you that you have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
6. A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and, under the pains and penalties of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner.

–SNIP–

Where would you rather post your content? This all has me thinking about the need for open social networking tools that allow us to keep in contact without being in a walled garden. Wired recently ran an [interesting story](http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/08/open_social_net “Slap in the Facebook”) that reviewed different ways to replicate Facebook functionality with more open tools. They’re not there yet, but they’re [close](http://howto.wired.com/wiredhowtos/index.cgi?page_name=replace_facebook_using_open_social_tools;action=display;category=Live “Replacing Facebook Using Open Social Tools”)

From [Facebook's Terms of Service](http://utoronto.facebook.com/terms.php “Terms of Service”)

–SNIP–

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. 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.

–SNIP–

There is more to this that bothers me other than the silliness of the prose. If I read correctly, by posting photos of my two year old daughter on Facebook, I give them a full and transferable license to use such content. This goes for other content as well. I doubt that they would, but they *could* sell anything on my profile on Ebay.

Strangely, I have never been concerned about copyright or ownership over content, and avoid publishing in places that restrict access. But to give Facebook this leverage just feels…dirty.

I have become quite accustomed to using Facebook, mainly as a realtime address-book of sorts, but this is too much. Photos going down as we speak, and perhaps the rest will go soon.

It’s been quite a while since I posted on this weblog. So long, in fact, that I’ve often thought about closing it entirely. The silence is partially due to a hectic work schedule and a little girl who seems to think that my computer is there for the sole purpose of her watching Elmo. Facebook has also eaten into my time on the Blog. But I’m going to try to get back to it in the coming weeks.

Just how harmful is Wifi anyway? Some folk at the BBC [believe](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/6674675.stm) that is is a pretty scary thing. Whether it gives me cancer or not, I can’t help but think that the biggest harm is the newfound ability to waste time surfing the net anywhere. But without wifi, I would not have found this [gem](http://www.wellingtongrey.net/miscellanea/archive/2007-05-27–the-truth-about-wireless-devices.html), from Wellington Grey. Of course, Canada’s own [Lakehead University](http://policies.lakeheadu.ca/policy.php?pid=178) (hardly home to luddites) is still largely wireless-free.


Look at this! Two posts in one day. But neither say much about anything of substance (then again, when was the last time that you saw a substantive Blog __anywhere__). Today’s event is that I’m just excited by Tod Dichendorf’s new(ish) “Blogmate”:http:http://ditchnet.org/blogmate/ plugin for “Textmate”:http://macromates.com. It seems that there is now nothing that can’t be done in my trusted text editor.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year exploring how different tools can assist dispersed groups in the nonprofit sector to better collaborate with each other. My experience has been mixed. Multiple languages and cultures, chronic overwork and a general unease about technology often dominates workgroups in international development.

There is an ever increasing amount of basic how-tos on the web that can be useful for nonprofits who want to make better use of communications technology. Social Signal has a good overview of how the many tools of Web 2.0 – RSS, tags and social bookmarking can be used in the non profit world. See the link here.

Unfortunately, the Achilles heel of many of these ventures is that many (though certainly not all, or even most) in the nonprofit world don’t read very much! Online collaboration and knowledge sharing tend to work when the collaborators are intellectually curious about their field and when they are interested in engaging. For those who do not feel that they have the interest or the time, RSS simply offers a flood of more information that is of limited use.