The fragility of social networks

What would happen if we suddenly lost access to Twitter? This could happen for any number of reasons, either with activists accounts being shut down, or with Twitter itself going offline or being blocked by government.

A friend of mine is worried that if she lost her Twitter account then she would lose contact with the few thousand people that follow her and she has enquired about backing up the names of those followers. There are tools that are able to download and save the names of contacts from Twitter but there is a problem; if the only identifier that you have for someone is their Twitter name, that may not be enough to find them in a post-twitter world. They could easily have used a different name everywhere else even if you knew what service they had moved to.

So how would the anti-cuts movement cope with the loss of Twitter? I suspect that while many people could still stay in touch, whole networks would become fragmented and information would not flow nearly as quickly. Many people that do not use Facebook and perhaps do not use the relevant web pages would be unable to get information from their usual contacts through twitter. They may well eventually find out what they need to know, but it would take much longer.

I do not think that there has been a problem so far with Twitter accounts; I am only aware of spammers being evicted from Twitter, although inevitably there will be some other examples. I think that this will change and it is quite likely to follow the example set by Facebook.

Facebook is not your friend. Facebook is a privately owned business which encourages you to post updates and share information so that it can profit from you. As a private business, Facebook has no obligation to honour the principles of free speech or to provide a service. Facebook can remove pages for any reason it likes. Sometimes it removes pages because they contain discussion of illegal actions or if enough people report the page for containing spam or offensive content. Pages have been removed in the past because of fake copyright claims. The default action in this situation is to remove pages now and ask questions later. Pages could also be removed purely because staff at Facebook don’t like them and being a private company, they don’t have to have a reason. Last week Facebook removed more than fifty anti-cuts and protest related pages without warning. The removal of these pages meant that these groups of people were suddenly fractured and the lists of members and interested people were lost. This is not the first time that protest-related pages have been removed and previous removals have caused massive inconvenience to both organisers and followers. A partial list of affected pages is available here. http://anticutsspace.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/political-facebook-groups-deleted-on-royal-wedding-day/

Clearly, then, we cannot trust Facebook when organising events, especially if the event might make them nervous or if they fear legal action for facilitating it. I think the same applies or will soon apply to Twitter, and to services such as Livejournal, WordPress, Blogger and others. Even websites are not safe. Websites are hosted by a provider and that provider can be subjected to pressure from lawyers or law enforcement agencies, and when that happens they usually cave in to pressure and pull the website. The safest option is likely to be a privately owned server in a small datacentre but not many can afford that.

Ultimately, my advice is do not trust Facebook, Twitter, or any other social network or service that serves as a point of contact. If there is a person that you wish to stay in touch with even after losing access to these networks, I suggest making sure that you have at least two different methods of contacting them apart from social media. Email and phone number are probably best. Ideally we should organise a phone tree or an email tree as a backup within our protest movements, or perhaps a combination of both.

You have zero privacy anyway, get over it

“You have zero privacy anyway, get over it”

Those words were uttered by Scott Mcnealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, in 1999. It made a big storm at the time in computing circles and left a lot of people outraged. This pre-dated Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, even Friends Reunited and so the age of sharing every intimate detail had not yet arrived but there were signs; in 1997 I and many of my friends at university had personal web sites on which we did share information. In fact, I had my CV available on my web site which I wouldn’t dream of doing now.

In reality, in 1999 privacy was an issue that was both important and not important to me. I was paranoid about my personal email and telephone calls being snooped on and I used PGP to encrypt my email. On the other hand, I happily gave out my name, address, email address, age, girlfriends name, my course at university and more on my university web page and my Tripod web page. Now days I am much more careful with my information and if it is online at all I try to restrict its visibility to just a few people but back then it wasn’t important to me.

I think there are two reasons for that. One reason is simply that web pages were new and exciting technology, and we all got carried away. The other is that individual web pages did not carry the same big-brother overtones that social networks do. When the data is held in one central searchable database it seems very different to many separate web sites. Back in 1999 we barely even had effective search engines, with Google being less than two years old, and so most people looking at a personal web site would be friends, family or colleagues. I first started to lock down my information when I realised that it could have a negative impact in the future. Future employers could easily search the internet for a name and refuse someone a job based on what they see.

With Facebook and other social networks, we are encouraged to share all sorts of personal information. Many people share their complete education history, work history, relationship status, religious beliefs, hobbies, favourite music, film and books, birthday, who they are friends with, status updates and photographs. All this information used to be exposed by default on Facebook, but if you sign up now it will at least mark these things for viewing by friends only. Even so, many teenagers have this information available to everyone and are not even aware that it could be any other way or why they might want that.

Search engines are a huge problem for privacy. Type a persons name into Google, and the chances are that you will find their social networking accounts and their photograph. You will also see personal directories such as 123people.co.uk which gather a worrying amount of information from social networks, the electoral roll, public records and so on. These directories and search engines make it very difficult to hide yourself from searches.

Another aspect of privacy is tracking. People have been worried for years about being tracked by advertising networks such as Doubleclick. (Now owned by Google.) A lot of people delete browser cookies on a regular basis to prevent this tracking. It is also possible to opt out of this tracking. More recently many websites have started to select adverts to show the viewer based not only on the tracking information but also on data from websites viewed. For example, last year I searched the Halfords website for toolboxes of a certain type. For about a week afterwards I saw adverts for toolboxes of the type I had been interested in shown to me on many web sites. (I normally block adverts, but I couldn’t at that time.) I could see this being very damaging if it showed adverts for something you wished to keep secret while someone else could see the screen.

In 2008 a company called Phorm tried to go even further. Instead of tracking you only through web sites displaying their adverts, they installed equipment at the heart of the BT network which would look at every web site visited and search made. They would then show adverts on selected websites and those adverts would be selected based on all of your web surfing! Needless to say there was an outcry and even questions by MPs.

Unfortunately the most intrusive tracking is now being entered into voluntarily. The Facebook account seems to have become the universal way to identify someone and lots of websites allow you to sign up or log in through Facebook Connect. The “Like” button has become ubiquitous as sites encourage you to share them with your friends. All of this means that Facebook has a vast knowledge of all the websites that you visit that use these things. This has even extended to a tie-up between Facebook and NHS Choices. The only way around that is to log out of Facebook and delete your browser cookies before visiting any other sites.

Facebook Comments, which allow comments to be left on blogs through your facebook account, are particularly intrusive because they link together your web browsing and your social network. If you enter a comment on a website using this system it will be shared back to Facebook and posted on your wall if you are not careful. That can tell everyone on your friends list what web site you were commenting on and what you said. That may be alright on many occasions, but perhaps more than you want to share on others. The rise of Facebook Comments also means that everyone must use their real name on these web sites. That has led many to ask if it is the death of anonymity. I would imagine that websites discussing sensitive issues are unlikely to use Facebook Comments for this reason. Even Disqus comments, a system which I use on this blog, can allow other people to track your comments from one blog to another. It does at least allow anonymous commenting in most cases.

Etsy and Google Buzz show a typical corporate cavalier attitude to private personal data. When Google introduced Buzz they simply added it to every Google Mail account, and made the personal address books of every user available through Buzz as a contact list. This “on by default” attitude caused a lot of bad press for Google and they quickly changed it to require activation by the user. More recently Etsy has done the same thing. People that signed up to buy and sell “all things handmade, vintage and supplies” suddenly found their accounts visible to all through Etsy’s new People Search. Feedback that they had left on purchases or on buyers suddenly exposed details of items purchased, and these details show up on search engines too. One woman has had some particularly embarrassing information exposed on Google right next to her CV. All this because the owner of Etsy would like it to become a social network.

The trend is towards sharing more and more information on the internet. I think Scot McNealy was right, although a few years ahead of his time. For all our efforts, privacy is dead, and voluntarily at that. I don’t actually see how it can go any other way though – recent events have shown that information cannot be kept secret any more. Fred Goodwin’s super-injunction could not prevent people from announcing that he was a banker. Dictators in the middle east were unable to prevent pictures and news reports from making it to our TV screens.

I believe this marks a cultural shift in attitude to privacy. In the last ten years people have started to live their lives in a much more open way and to share information and events on the internet in a myriad of ways. In a world where it is commonplace to show photographs of a drunken night out to everyone, or to discuss a relationship break up in public, attitudes to past actions must change. Employers searching out potential employees through Google are going to have to realise that everyone is human and no one is perfect. If they don’t see anything about a candidate to put them off, it probably means that the evidence has been hidden well! As a friend said recently, “These are the first generations to publish their entire lives in the public domain. Future leaders will doubtless hold juvenile views that they later discard and regret.” The public will have to realise that things done in the past do not accurately reflect the views of a politician in the present. If a persons entire past can be seen on the internet, people will have to be a lot more accepting.

It’s a brave new world.

Erasing the past

I am currently bedridden, suffering from ME and an as yet unidentified further illness. Twitter is my lifeline and is what has been keeping me sane, and I have managed to produce some ten thousand or more tweets in the last three months. Having finally given up any hope of managing to work, even through my computer from my bed, I have just started the process of applying for ESA and will be judged on whether I am fit to work or not before I can receive it.

I started to worry that my heavy use of twitter could be used against me in this process. I have already explained how and why I can use twitter without that meaning that I am fit to work, but I also worried that my tweets could easily be taken out of context. For example, a tweet about undertaking an activity of some sort could be used as proof that I can do that all the time. What an investigator would not see is how good or bad a day I was having, how much I had to prepare for and work around the activity, or how much pain and exhaustion that activity would cause for days afterwards.

I think the rumours of investigations into ESA claimants usage of social networks are probably not true, but I don’t want to take that chance. I do not have the energy to fight through an appeal should I be declared fit to work.

And so, on Thursday I took the drastic step of deleting all 12,272 of my tweets. I am fully aware that deleted tweets are not really deleted. Although they will no longer appear in my timeline, they are still there to anyone that knows the direct link to the tweet, they will still appear wherever they have been retweeted. (And some have been retweeted more than a hundred times.) They have been indexed by Google and by Topsy, and many others. What I have tweeted can be quite easily found by someone that is really determined, but I simply wanted to put my tweets beyond the reach of fairly incompetent researchers. Someone that I know has done the same thing to prevent trawling by tabloid journalists.

If you are interested in doing the same thing yourself for any reason, I used two tools to do the job. I had to use two because the first one did not work completely. The first was Twitwipe, found at http://twitwipe.com/ and the second was Tweet Eraser, found at http://www.tweeteraser.com/

—Addendum—

This post was intended as a quick explanation for friends that were asking my reasons, but has suddenly become rather popular and has had 500 views in a few minutes. The irony of this has been pointed out to me. If you are here investigating me, please make sure you read all my reasoning, and don’t misquote me.

Relevant earlier posts

If you can tweet you can work, and other such lies

Nothing to hide? I pity you

If you can tweet you can work, and other such lies

Picture the scene: I am lying in bed on my front, with my head turned to the side. My right arm is flat on the bed, a phone propped up by my hand. The only part of me moving is my thumb, pressing the on screen keyboard. Pain is tearing through my body, what I feel in my arms, my legs and my hands is agonising. I don’t have the strength to lift any part of my body from the bed. And yet, I have one, tiny connection to the world – I can send messages out through twitter, and I can receive replies, 140 characters at a time. This is my often my only interaction with anyone else at this point. Through twitter, I can talk to friends, take my mind off my pain and discuss something – anything else. When the pain is too much, I’ve got a support group of fellow sick people and we can commiserate about the pain.

Fortunately, I am not this incapacitated all of the time. No, much of the last few weeks I have been so energetic that I have been able lie back on a pile of pillows and type on a full keyboard for as much as a few minutes before the searing pain in my hands sets in. Sometimes, gasp, I can even make it to a different room in the house for a while.

And yet, according to Nadine Dorries MP, my usage of twitter means that I can work. I can’t get out of bed most of the time, but apparently I am a scrounger who is defrauding the benefit system.

Last September Dorries made a request on her blog for people to look out for people tweeting too much and report them to her. She also asked people to report anyone who tweeted a lot while on benefits to the Department of Work and Pensions. She went on to pick on someone who was waiting for surgery for arthritis on both feet for their prolific use of twitter.

It gets worse. There are now rumours that ATOS (The company paid to assess people, who have been known to declare people fit for work just before they die from their illness) will be checking twitter and other social networks for activity that indicates ability to use a computer for any length of time. Because, you know, that makes you fit for work. Now this may just be rumours, but it shows a huge problem with public and government attitude to the sick and disabled.

I want to work, I really do. I own a business that my father and I have built up over the last 17 months into something that has the potential to go somewhere. I started my business as a last resort, since both of us are disabled, to try and provide part time work for myself that could be done when I have the strength to do it, not strictly between 9am and 5pm. I have been trying to build up more web hosting and design work, and I even tried to carry on working from my bed when this relapse started nearly three months ago. Unfortunately I have reached the point where brain fog has killed my concentration, and pain and fatigue won’t let me keep going to long enough to finish any work related tasks.

I can write, but I couldn’t tell you when or how much I could write. I can tweet, but that’s because tweets are short, and (mostly) fit in between bouts of brain fog which stops me completing my thoughts. I can set up a website without leaving my bed, but who is going to hire me to do that when it might happen now or it might take me weeks because of my health? I could be brought a customers computer to remove viruses from, but then not have the strength or concentration to do it for days.

The fact is, I can’t work. I am not employable. If I had ANY chance at all of working, I would be desperately trying to save my business into which we have sunk time and money and worked so hard for the last year and a half. I have hurt myself trying to run my business and have had to give up and apply for ESA because I have no other choice. And yet, because I have a variable, invisible disease, I am highly likely to be deemed “Fit for work” by the Work Capability Assessment. I won’t have the strength to appeal against that and I won’t have a Citizens Advice Bureau to help me because they are all being shut down.

So I am going to carry on tweeting and blogging. I have precious little other contact with the world and I will lose my friends and my support group if I don’t. Someone looking at my online activity and judging me on it cannot see how long each blog post took me, or the pain that I have to endure to even communicate with others online. The portrayal by government and by media of all sick and disabled people as scroungers and cheats is disgusting and yet good people that should know better are taken in by it. If you think I should just lie here and be miserable while I wait to be denied my ESA, then screw you. You are the problem.

More on the despicable behaviour of Nadine Dorries

BMJ: Well enough to work? A report on ATOS by a GP.

Guardian: Frequent tweeting doesn’t make one a benefit cheat, Nadine Dorries

Why campaigning online isn’t such a waste of time

This article is partly a rehash of things that I have said before, but I think it bears repeating.

You have probably heard that the student movement against the increase of tuition fees made extensive use of Social Networks. You probably know that UK Uncut and other anti-cuts groups are organised entirely via Twitter, Facebook and their website. But the key thing, we are told, is getting out there in person to protest. Actually protesting on the internet (rather than organising) seems to be frowned upon. I recently read an article titled Clicktivism is ruining leftist activism. The gist of the argument is that activism on the internet has no effect because it consists of adding names to petitions and sending out form emails to MPs. I think that article missed the point; and missed the huge opportunities presented by the internet.

In a Guardian article last month Clifford Singer said that Social media has transformed protest. He talked about how social media has been used to unite activist groups and organise real-world actions, and he was correct to say that protest has been transformed, but there is another important point to make about the power of the internet in its own right.

As a political activist who is chronically sick I have found it extremely frustrating to be undergoing a severe relapse at a time when I want nothing more than to be out protesting. I want to stand up and be counted but at the moment I can barely stand up at all. But have I really been deprived of a voice? Has my chance to change things been lost because of my illness? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say no. In fact, I think I personally have had more influence through the internet than I would have had out on the streets.

Activism on the internet is not just about adding your email address to petitions, or clicking “Like” on Facebook. Petitions have their place, but tend to carry less weight than letters and debate, which is where the real power of the internet lies. I think the key areas where the internet can change things are Awareness, Debate and Influence. With millions of people using social networks raising awareness is much easier than in the physical world. Current issues come up in daily conversation online, and an interesting thing about social networks is that your friends get to see what you are talking about, even if they don’t follow the whole conversation.

The nature of the internet is such that with a bit of luck a good blog article or Youtube video can “go viral” and end up in front of hundreds of thousands of people who would not otherwise be aware of the issues. Although I was taken by surprise when this has happened to me in the past it is good to know that I had some impact even though I could not go out on the streets myself.

Social networks are a great leveller. Journalists, TV presenters, CEOs, celebrities and politicians all use social networks. It is easy, even commonplace, to have a discussion involving someone influential and to either become more informed by them or to inform and influence them yourself. I have witnessed a party affiliation change after a discussion with Ed Milliband via twitter, and I have seen MPs decide to sign Early Day Motions after constituents contacted them through twitter. I have seen journalists write about issues and bring them to a wider audience after they became aware of them through Facebook and twitter.

Websites like They Work For You and What Do They Know make it easy to keep tabs on what your elected representatives are doing at all levels of government. Sites such as Write To Them give an effortless way to send our thoughts to our politicians, sending our missives by email where it is an option, or by fax where it is not. The Tweetminster website can put you in touch with your MP via twitter. Form letters are not so effective, but thoughtful discussion through these methods can make a difference.

I am not arguing that everyone should cease protesting immediately or that they should move back from the streets to the internet. Far from it. I believe that changing opinion requires the use of every available method of protest. But here’s the thing: If you want to change opinions and like me, you can’t go out to protest, the internet isn’t such a bad place to be.

Life with ME: My technology lifeline

I have M.E. It’s a crippling disease that robs people of their capabilities and their independence. Here’s a good video about it on Youtube. I am not as badly affected as some people with ME. I am able to leave the house, ride my motorbike (sometimes) and generally don’t need constant care. I even spend part of my time running a business. Other people that I know are not always so lucky. Even with my relatively minor disabilities, I would have quite a miserable existence if it were not for one thing.

Technology

Technology provides a massive help to me in all aspects of my life. Technology helps me sleep, wake up, eat, communicate and rest. Here are some of the things that help me.

Communications

I often get so tired that I cannot speak. I also find that when I am that tired, my brain trips up even thinking of sentences to say. When I am in this state, I have found that I can still type on a keyboard or on a touch screen phone. Not only that, but I can type coherent sentences, partly because I can edit them before sending them.

Social networks like Twitter and Facebook allow me to talk to people about anything I want, at nearly any time of the day. When I can’t sleep at 4am, I can talk to people with the same problem. When I am stuck in the house for days on end and see no one except my wife, I can talk to people on the internet.

ME includes constant muscle pain which gets worse after any activity. This applies even to the small muscles in my hand. As a result I am unable to hold a pen for very long, and activities such as filling in long forms leave me in agonising pain within minutes. I am able to type where I cannot write with a pen.

Food

In a similar vein, I cannot prepare food or cook without severe pain. Carrying a saucepan is tricky. Carrying a kettle when I don’t have the strength could be highly dangerous. Stirring food hurts. Chopping food can make me cry out in pain. I avoid food preparation wherever possible but there are frequent occasions when I have no choice in the matter. This is where frozen meals and microwave ovens are lifesavers for me. If I didn’t have access to pre-prepared meals, (Often cooked and frozen by my wife) a freezer and a microwave oven, I would need much more care than I do.

Memory

ME can affect my memory quite badly. I also have a general problem of getting so into one task that I forget to take my medicine at the correct time, forget to take one of my regular rests, and even forget to sleep. I rely on Google Calendar and on my phone to help me there. Any event or task that I have to do goes in to my calendar, which will sound an alert on my phone at the right time. I have my all too frequent rests and my multiple times-per-day medicines set as alarms on my phone. The only thing I need to do now is actually pay attention when it beeps!

Bad memory also causes a number of other problems for me. I make extensive use of Springpad to help me out. A Springpad app on my Android phone lets me write quick notes and also take photographs when I am away from my computer. It all gets synchronised with their website, and when I need to remember something I can look up the photo and the note to help me. Sometimes I really can’t remember the words that I need, or what I was about to do. I frequently refer to Google search to look for keywords related to the concept I am after, and it usually provides the word or task that I needed to remember!

Sleeping

I struggle to go to sleep, and I struggle to wake up again. (You can read about the waking up bit in my earlier blog post, A Morning With ME.) One very useful aid to sleeping and waking is my Sunrise/Sunset lamp from Lumie. It has an alarm clock and a lamp in it. At night, I can set the alarm, then press the button to get a simulated sunset which isn’t that effective for me as it doesn’t stop my brain from whirling with thoughts, but it is sometimes helpful. In the morning, it simulates a sunrise over about half an hour and provides a much easier wake up than a straightforward alarm clock.

I also struggle to rest. A big problem with ME is having too many thoughts and being unable to stop thinking about things and relax. I have to spend 20 minutes resting several times a day in order to function well, and staying there to rest is very difficult to me because I tend to think of things like this blog post, then get up to do them! The solution is that I download podcasts of radio shows, put them on my phone, and play them when I am resting.

Computing

With all my use of the computer, being sometimes physically unable to use it can be devastating. I use a few tools to help me keep using it.

f.lux is an excellent bit of software that adjusts the colour temperature of my screen based on the time of day. This isn’t the same as adjusting brightness, it actually changes the mix of colours to suit the lighting that I am using and the level of daylight available. Using a lower colour temperature at night helps reduce eye strain and makes it more comfortable to use the computer, as well as making use of the computer just before sleep less of a factor in insomnia. You can download f.lux for free here.

Web pages often have small text, clashing colours, backgrounds that are too bright and worse. There are two ways that I cope with this problem. The first is Readability. Readability is installed as a bookmark button in the toolbar. When I find a long web page that is difficult to read, I only have to click the bookmark and the page transforms into large, good contrast text with a much darker background. Brilliant! Or, err, less brilliant. Cool. (Install Readability here.)

Sometimes I can’t physically sit at the computer. This is where a Kindle ebook reader is useful. The Kindle has an electronic ink screen which is designed to look like paper. It is not backlit like an LCD computer monitor is. It is equiped with WiFi and documents can be emailed to it. I use a tool called RekindleIT which again, is installed as a bookmark button. When I click the button, the web page that I am reading is emailed to the Kindle ready for me to read in bed or on the sofa. (Install RekindleIT here. I have written more about putting documents and website on the Kindle at my business website.) I should also mention that the Kindle allows me to read large, heavy books that would otherwise hurt me to hold and read for very long.

Working

Having all these things wrong with me makes it hard to work for a living. With incapacity benefit and disability living allowance disappearing, I don’t have much choice. For the last year I have worked as hard as I can (even at the expense of any remaining health) to set up a computer repair and web development business along with my Dad and other family members and friends. I’m rapidly heading in to one of the worse parts of my illness though, and I expect to spend a few weeks, even months, in bed starting any day now. Mobile technology will allow me to keep working to some extent. I can answer technical support queries and direct my business through email and chat. I can setup websites for my customers using my laptop from my bed. It won’t be pleasant, but unlike the last time I was imprisoned in my own bed, this time I don’t have to go insane, and I might even still do some work.

In summary, then, technology allows me to:

Keep communicating when I can’t speak
Chat to people when I can’t get out
Write long texts and fill in forms when I can’t write with a pen without pain
Heat my own food instead of requiring someone to do it for me
Remember to take medicine and rest at the correct times
Keep notes and photo notes to help me remember information
Remember words, concepts and tasks by searching the internet for related things
Wake up in the morning
Rest without getting too distracted
Keep using my computer by adjusting it to prevent eyestrain
Keep reading when I can’t physically use my computer
Undertake paid work when I can’t even get out of bed

ME has tried its best to rob me of a decent life. Technology has given me a way to fight back. I don’t have to accept my quality of life being taken from me. Technology can help others to say the same.

All your photos are belong to Facebook

Does Facebook have the right to sell your photos? Worryingly, the answer is probably yes.

The original photo as used by the Daily Mail. ©UCL Occupation

The Daily Mail published a story (The word story is used here in the loosest possible sense.) about Aaron Peters, a student involved in the UCL Occupation and the UK Uncut protests. The second photo in that article, also shown above, was taken by a friend of Aarons and was posted to Flickr, where it is licensed for re-use by others under the Creative Commons “Some rights reserved” license. This would allow anyone to use the photo as long as they attribute the copyright of the photo to “UCL Occupation” or provide a link back to the photo on Flickr, as I have here.

However, the Daily Mail has actually labelled the picture as ©Facebook. This would imply that they took the photo from Facebook, where it had been uploaded for ease of sharing with friends. It is possible that the Mail simply lifted the photo from Facebook without permission, which would be straightforward copyright violation. However, reading the the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities gives this information:

2. Sharing Your Content and Information

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. In addition:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

Basically, that boils down to saying that Facebook can give or sell your photo to anyone that they like, for any purpose including commercial use and publication in a national newspaper. The question is, do Facebook have this arrangement with the Daily Mail? Is it the case that the Daily Mail can use any photo that has been uploaded to Facebook? Do they pay per photo or do they have a blanket license agreement?

One thing is certain. I won’t be putting any more photos on Facebook.

—Addendum —

Many people are saying that the license granted to Facebook is subject to your privacy settings. That is not true. The order and the wording used clearly show that the license that you grant to Facebook overrides the preceding statement. Privacy settings such as ‘Friends only’ may have prevented the Daily Mail from seeing the picture at all, but that is not the issue here.

It is a necessary evil to grant a license to Facebook to display your photo, otherwise they could not show it to people viewing Facebook. The problem arrises because the license that Facebook claim is much broader than necessary, granting them a sub-licensable, royalty free use of your photo. That is the wording that allows them to sell your photo and keep the profits.

It might be that the Daily Mail stole the photograph without permission and the ©Facebook is half hearted attempt to get away with it. It might be that Facebook sold the license to them. Either way, people need to know.

You’re all criminals

You’re all criminals. That’s not a sleight on your character, it’s just a simple fact. The law, as it stands, criminalises nearly everyone that writes stuff on the internet, or uses a telephone, which I am assuming is all of you.

The law in question is the Communications Act 2003, which you can read here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127 It is the law under which Paul Chambers has just been prosecuted for using twitter to send a joke to his friends.

Here is the relevant text:

(1)A person is guilty of an offence if he—

(a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or

(b)causes any such message or matter to be so sent.

(2)A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he—

(a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false,

(b)causes such a message to be sent; or

(c)persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.

If I read that right (andI may be wrong) then telling an untruth in jest to wind a friend up is illegal. Telling an obscene joke is illegal. Putting something obscene as your status on facebook is illegal. Sarcasm and Hyperbole are both illegal.

See you all in prison.

Further reading