Breitling Replica Watches & Facebook

For a moment consider Facebook as a very particular private company: a Breitling Replica watch company, for the sake of argument. Because Facebook is a site that people feel personally invested in, they often forget that it is a business, whose guidelines they agreed to when they first signed up.

Now, imagine that when you first gave your personal information to a watch site when you purchased a Navitimer replica, you agreed to let them copy, publicly display, re-format and distribute your information, for any reason that they wanted to. In this example, it’s clear that you gave the go-ahead for a private company to do whatever they wanted to with your details.

The problem is, once you deactivate your watch account, you would not assume that they would archive your information to use whenever they wanted to. Even if you did, you would certainly not guess that they would use your intellectual property for their own gain.

Because Facebook is a cheap, effective marketing tool for semi-professional young writers, photographers and artists, its policies stray from being a normal company, and get into more unsteady ground.

The is the difference between a fake Breitling watch company and Facebook is that the former would only use your information for research. The latter is claiming copyright on what their users create, and doesn’t have any intention of crediting them if their photographs are used as a Facebook ad, for instance.

An article published in The New York Times yesterday spent more time congratulating Facebook for uniting friends and citizens than it did addressing their questionable terms of service, that, among other things, give the company commercial control over the content people upload to the site.

While the article did address the difficulty with maintaining social borders, such as those between parents and children, it spent much more time discussing the problem of parents finding pictures of their under-aged children drinking alcohol (an issue which was popular with shows such as Oprah and The View last year).

While users are widely opposed to terms that grant Facebook the right to license, copy and disseminate members’ content worldwide, they aren’t exactly jumping ship. And Facebook isn’t about to change their minds. “It’s not a democracy,” Mr. Cox stressed when talking to the New York Times yesterday.

As Facebook is such a specific site, it’s difficult for people to see it as a private company, and not a democracy. Consider if the replica watches business had the same policies. If people really want their opinion to be heard, they have to ditch their social networking addiction and stop giving their property over, daily, to a company that could care less.