Facebook : « faites nous confiance »

Suite aux très nombreuses réactions ces derniers jours au sujet de la modification des conditions d’utilisation du service de Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg (PDG) a voulu clarifier la situation. Selon Zuckerberg Facebook doit avoir une licence de votre contenu pour que vos amis puissent (re)publier vos photos ou vos vidéos sur leur profil, sans cette dernière Facebook ne pourrait fonctionner. C’est pourquoi ils ont modifié les conditions afin de faire en sorte que si vous fermez votre profil, vos amis puissent toujours afficher vos contenus… Une approche un peu facile il me semble, une option d’effacement ne semblerait appropriée.

Ci dessous une copie de l’article de Mark Zuckerberg publiée sur le blog de Facebook hier soir :

On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information
A couple of weeks ago, we updated our terms of use to clarify a few points for our users. A number of people have raised questions about our changes, so I’d like to address those here. I’ll also take the opportunity to explain how we think about people’s information.

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work. Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment.

We still have work to do to communicate more clearly about these issues, and our terms are one example of this. Our philosophy that people own their information and control who they share it with has remained constant. A lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective of the rights we need to provide this service to you. Over time we will continue to clarify our positions and make the terms simpler.

Still, the interesting thing about this change in our terms is that it highlights the importance of these issues and their complexity. People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people’s information. These two positions are at odds with each other. There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.

We’re at an interesting point in the development of the open online world where these issues are being worked out. It’s difficult terrain to navigate and we’re going to make some missteps, but as the leading service for sharing information we take these issues and our responsibility to help resolve them very seriously. This is a big focus for us this year, and I’ll post some more thoughts on openness and these other issues soon.

Pour résumer, Zuckerberg reconnait que les termes doivent être précisés et qu’il faut que les utilisateurs fassent confiance à Facebook qui s’engage bien entendu à ce que les contenus ne soient pas utilisés sous des formes qui ne plaisent pas aux utilisateurs (propriétaires des contenus).

Cet intervention n’apporte pas de réponse précise ni de modification au contrat liant les utilisateurs à Facebook, mais permet très certainement d’éviter que la situation ne dégénère sur le réseau social. Attendons de voir la nouvelle version qui à mon avis ne vas pas tarder à être publiée, pour voir si Facebook a bien retenu la leçon.