Just a bit of food for thought, as you go about your increasingly-online lives: what happens to your personal information if your online service goes bankrupt? In at least one case, things have turned out all right, but only after “Creditors of XY Magazine claimed that the magazine’s subscriber base and its readers’ personal information was an asset that they were entitled to in a bankruptcy proceeding.” (See Bankruptcy Proceeding Threatens Readers’ Privacy for the full article.) In this particular case, because the magazine had a privacy policy which stated that they would protect its users’ personal details and never share them, the users were protected (fortunately for them, as the magazine’s market was young, gay males, at least some of whom hadn’t gone public with the fact).
What does that mean to you, though, when you routinely enter your private information, ticking the box which says, “I have read and agreed to the terms of service?” Well, let’s consider what you’ve signed away, if you have a FaceHook account (as do half a billion others), shall we?
According to their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, are your personal photos protected? Your “notes”? If they go bankrupt, since you’ve agreed (in the T.O.S.) to them sub-licensing your content – without paying you – I’d suspect not.
Further, they explicitly state, “By using Facebook, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.” So, all of you in the US, you’re already there. What does that mean to the rest of the world, though? Well, it means that they are not subject to, for example, The UK Data Protection Act, which means that they are not required to destroy your information should you decide to leave them.
Should you be worried? Well, is the company earning any money?
This doesn’t just apply to FaceHook, of course. It also applies to any number of companies out there, any number of which may decide to sell some of their assets, should they run into trouble, just as XY Magazine did.
I realize that not everybody is bothered by this – it’s become just the way things are – but I wonder whether the world wouldn’t be a better place if all of our information were safeguarded by law, rather than simply by caveat emptor, because the buyers do not read the privacy policies, and are not being aware.
-D
