56 Percent of Facebook Users Want the Old ToS Back

by Adam Ostrow

… and 38 percent simply “don’t know” what they want, according to a poll being conducted by Facebook in selected user’s news feeds discovered by CNET.

The poll, which asks whether or not Facebook should return to its previous Terms of Service, follows yesterday’s blog post by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which the company’s founder defended the social network’s policy of keeping your content indefinitely, even after you delete your account.

The uproar began over the weekend, when it was discovered that Facebook had altered their terms of service, to among other things, grant the company an “irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute [your content].”

Looking at the results of the poll so far – which is presumably being conducted with a representative sampling of Facebook users – just about no one likes the change, as only 6 percent have indicated that Facebook shouldn’t change the ToS back. And while “Don’t Know” makes up a sizeable portion of the poll result, it’s clear that the story has moved beyond technology blogs to become an issue at least a fairly significant portion of Facebook users are aware of.

[img courtesy of cnet]

Along those lines, the same type of protest we saw around the Facebook re-design is starting to transpire within the social network itself. The group “People Against the new terms of service” has swelled to more than 60,000 members and appears to be adding dozens every few seconds. And in perhaps an even more serious concern, The Electronic Privacy Information Center is set to file a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about Facebook’s ToS, according to PC World.

As with Facebook’s past transgressions, the problem seems to be less about the net result than the poor communication on the company’s part. While they blogged about changes to their terms of service back on February 4th, the changes to the part everyone is now furious about was omitted from that post. And once again, the company’s increasingly well-known CEO is hung out to dry, defending unpopular changes, as opposed to promoting all the exciting things going on at Facebook.