Technolyser Series – Making Facebook Less Intrusive & Knowing Your Rights Part 2

This is the second post on Facebook in our series Technolyser. (Previous post here) Last time we had just stopped short of discussing Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. So we are gonna begin from where we left. Without much ado let’s start with Clause 2(1) which under the heading ‘Sharing Your Content and Information’ states that

“subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

Not much can be done here. Easy fix is that you change the privacy of any post (Hereinafter post includes comment/photo/video) you don’t want to be available to the world at large to ‘only me’ or ‘friends only’.

Clause 2(2) states that even after you delete your account Facebook may retain some of your post for a reasonable period of time in their backup.

Muddy waters begin from Clause 2(4) which gives Facebook the permission to use your name, profile picture, information etc.  in connection with commercial. So liking that Porn Star’s Page does not seem the best idea if you don’t want something like ‘John Doe and 17 other friends like XXX. Click to like this page’ to pop in your friends’/relatives’/siblings’ feed.

Things get even more interesting from Clause 2(5) onwards where Facebook can unilaterally change its terms and will notify them on its Facebook Site Governance page instead of individually notifying you like Google and your continued use of Facebook for 7 days after change in terms will amount to your acceptance to the new terms. So do like this page so that you are notified every time Facebook changes its policy not that you care.

Clause 2(6) provides for a Forum Selection Clause and states that all disputes are subject to U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California or a state court located in San Mateo County and laws of State of California will govern the Statement. You need not worry much about this as Indian Courts are not much fan of such provisions and one could always invoke cases like Modi Entertainment Network v. W.S.G. Cricket PTE. Ltd. [(2003) 4 SCC 341] where it was held that “in an exceptional case for good and sufficient reasons, with a view to prevent injustice in circumstances such as which permit a contracting party to be relieved of the burden of the contract.” Not being able to go to US to file a lawsuit seems a sufficient reason enough apart from the fact that it takes away the jurisdiction of Indian courts something I doubt Indian judges would appreciate.

Clause 2(7) takes your consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Nothing much you could do in this regard and anyway it doesn’t matter much with NSA spying on you through Heartbleed (bug in OpenSSL encryption) since several years anyway.

To tell you more, Facebook is also fighting a legal battle in India, K.N. Govindacharya v. Union of India ,W.P. (C) NO.  3672/2012, Delhi High Court. The case has helped in getting grievance officer which you could contact here. To see how legal research can be done, please refer to our earlier post.