FaceBook: the Surveillance community.

Facebook: "We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or delete portions of these Terms of Use at any time without further notice."

This phrase is coming from the Facebook's Terms of Use, which is basically the virtual contract. Also exploring further this contract we can see that the Facebook is keeping the all rights to use the content provided by its users:


"All content on the Site and available through the Service, including designs, text, graphics, pictures, video, information, applications, software, music, sound and other files, and their selection and arrangement (the "Site Content"), are the proprietary property of the Company, its users or its licensors with all rights reserved"


But there are not too much said about the things like the private massages. And what the "information" means anyway? Well, above to that they have their Facebook's Privacy Policy . There we can find such an information:

"We share your information with third parties only in limited circumstances where we believe such sharing is 1) reasonably necessary to offer the service, 2) legally required or, 3) permitted by you."

The term "believe" applied here is quite flexible. But unfortunately this "Private Policy" is not the part of the contract. Only thing what the users can do is to believe that nothing unwanted will happen with their content, like: pictures, messages, comments etc.

And the Facebook is not the only place in this virtual world which has similar "user friendly" legal structures. That reminds me about the surveillance society and the Big Brother. Technologically it is easy to monitor and misuse the information of users and by giving a legal permission we are totally open to that.

Rather more problematic is question about the choice and free will. People are doing many things on internet, except one - reading the internet based contracts. If it was for buying a car, house or other kind of contract between two persons, people would be more careful. But electronical environment is so dynamic, flexible, that the next users are skipping everything just to get their desired thing more faster. Then our choice is already predetermined - we are just having a goal to get in touch with our friends. That is the matter of the perception and also the attitude. Humans are like a mouses which are striving to get the cheese, even if they may suspicious about that if it is a mouse trap.