You All Can Chill With That Facebook Privacy Post
If you've been online in the past few days (or really, the past several years), you've probably seen a bunch of your friends posting something like this:
While the post is well intended, it's completely, 100%, totally fake, and it won't protect you from any perceived privacy violation. Here are the facts:
1. Iterations of this post have made Internet rounds several times over the past few years, for some inexplicable reason. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
2. If you take a look at Facebook's Terms of Service page, the first line under Section 2, "Sharing your content and information" reads:
"You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings."
3. If you're still concerned about your privacy on Facebook, copy and pasting a message to your timeline isn't going to help. As Business Insider noted in January (during another rash of this hoax), you're also not preventing Facebook from "violating your privacy" when you repost a chain message. Per the outlet:
When you first signed up to use Facebook, you agreed to the company's Terms of Service, which include its privacy policy. And while Facebook at times updates its Terms of Service, your agreement to those updated terms is implicit.
You also agreed to give Facebook "a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook," according to the company's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. This means Facebook can use anything you post on the website to promote itself.
4. The "UCC 1-308- 1 1 308-103 and the Rome Statute" (cited in the viral post) isn't related to social media and/or privacy settings. The Uniform Code Listed has nothing to do with privacy settings, and The Rome Statute, created in 1998, is a document that established an International Crime Court. TL;DR: This supposed "legal grounding" has nothing to do with what you post on FB.
In short, if you're going to share something on Facebook, please share this post.
