Top 9 Facebook T&C Changes You Didn’t Hear About

by Herndon Hasty on 02/20/2009 at 10:38 am in Industry News, Performance Marketing, Social Media

Facebook this week caught heat for changes to its Terms & Conditions, which noted that even though you drop content from your page, it may hold on to archived versions – and that the content you produce would remain archived even after you cancel your account. Enough heat that prominent bloggers called for mass cancellations of accounts in protest – that’s right, protesting what happens to your account when you cancel it, by cancelling it. Sensible protests or not, Facebook retracted these changes later in the week.

But what else might be buried in the dry, boring text that we don’t even scroll through before we tick the ‘accept’ box? Here are the top nine quiet changes to Facebook’s T&Cs you might not have noticed:

1. Creators of new ‘become a vampire’ or ‘become a werewolf’ apps are to be promptly be shot with a silver bullet.
2. More than three profile picture changes per day will incur an automatic $.99 charge from iTunes for your copy of ‘You’re So Vain’.
3. Status message changes made between 1 AM and 5 AM will be automatically syndicated to your city’s Craigslist Erotic Services listings.
4. Status message changes made between 1 AM and 5 AM via mobile phone will be required to pass gmail’s anti drunk-mail testing.
5. Thirty or more status changes in a day will result in a ban from Facebook, which will then be re-directed to Twitter where you belong.
6. We’re getting rid of ‘poke’. Seriously, what was that ever about?
7. We’re getting rid of ‘In an open relationship’. The four people who this actually applies to complained we were diminishing their love by letting just anyone enter into one.
8. ‘About me’ entries longer than 700 characters in length will be replaced entirely with randomly selected ABBA lyrics and descriptions of cats. Just to save you the time.
9. All content created on Facebook.com belongs to the site in perpetuity – especially the dirty pics we won’t allow you to post. You don’t think we actually delete those, do you?