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Unless you’ve paid no attention to the web lately, you should know by now the mess around the facebook their new terms of service. To summarize the news, facebook launched new terms of service on which they explicitly said that they own you. Sorry, I tend to exaggerate sometimes, the terms of service covered almost anything you do or post to facebook even when and if you delete your profile. What this means is that facebook has the rights to use anything you post on your facebook page without asking you permission first.

Let’s make clear that this is a common practice in web communities, the problem is that facebook’s language on their terms of service was so vague that it made it sound like they owned and have the right to anything you do on your profile forever. This resulted in criticism so bad that facebook backed down removing the newly added terms of service and reverting back to their old terms of service.

Some people around the web started promoting the deletion of your facebook profile, a little over reaction I think. Other complaint in different media outlets like their blogs, their profiles on services like twitter, etc, this even made it to the news, several news channels reported on this which tells us that Facebook is very deep in our life. With this in mind I started asking myself several questions, 1) What if facebook disappeared?, 2) What if you lose control of your media?, 3) What if you lose it all?

What if facebook disappeared?

Do you have a copy of everything on your facebook profile? More applications, especially mobile applications, have access to facebook these days. This allows people to take pictures on the go and upload them to services like facebook, Flickr, etc., if you then erase the media from your device, what are you left with. I see more people making this mistake, leaving everything on facebook’s hands and believing that facebook will always be there is silly. The solution is simple, always, always load your images to your computer first, make sure you have a back up scheme in order for your computer and then upload your images wherever you want.

What if you lose control of your media?

Let say you take a picture that you are planning to profit from it, something like a sunset, a beautiful bird, anything; then you start selling the picture, it becomes famous but you forgot that it was once uploaded to your facebook account. Then what, well, facebook has the right to use the picture to promote their service and there is nothing you can do about it. This craziness can get to anyone and if you don’t act with care you can lose control of your media very easily.

What if you lose it all?

For this last example lets say that your house burn down or it gets burglarized, these are both really bad things to happen to anyone. If this were to happen to you, isn’t it great to at least have some of your memories on the web. That’s exactly what having your media in a place like facebook allows you to do. If all your photos live on the web you are good to go in case of a disaster. My point it’s exactly that living in the web has its pros and cons, whatever you do just don’t go crazy deleting your facebook account until a final draft of their terms of use is released to the public.

Have questions? Try me, dare to ask, if you find that I didn’t answer one of your facebook question with this article, leave your questions in the comments section of this post. Remember that you can follow me on facebook and on twitter. Like this post, share it with your friends, let everyone know about my website, share the love.