Facebook recently changed their Terms of Service regarding the ownership of the content you upload to their social network. Previously when material was deleted from your account or an account was closed the material connected to that account would be removed as well.

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

A very important note to this amendment is that privacy settings are still enforced. If you have posted something from full public view the privacy settings are also retained in perpetuity.

It was a post at The Consumerists an article entitled Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.” which started the uproar.

Mark Zuckerman, Facebook CEO, has responded to the stir on his Facebook Blog
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckermans response.

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. …

I doubt this is the end of this conversation.