Facebook is in the process of updating its user agreement documents, in part to clarify its position on employers demanding job applicants' log in details, but has also added a couple of sneaky additions.
Now known as its Statement of Rights and Obligations, Facebook's new user agreement is still being reviewed but includes a clause that it can store and process data on un-registered users who in any way interact with the site.
Facebook wants "non-users who interact with Facebook" to agree to have their "personal data transferred to and processed in the United States" – but it's not clear how these non-users who haven't signed up to Facebook can possibly give consent to these terms.
For its part, Facebook says that not much has changed:
"Facebook is a social website and so is our platform. Apps need data from friends to develop these social experiences and that is the whole purpose for our platform. If you're not comfortable with that, you can use your app settings to control what friends can share about you, block individual apps, or you can turn off the platform altogether," said Barry Schnitt, spokesperson for the social network
Book 'em, Lou
Most other changes to the nine-page pdf document are fairly superficial, but there's another pretty outrageous one: it requires that all Facebook users agree that Facebook owns the trademark for the word 'Book'.
We're not averse to referring to Zuckerberg's social network as the 'Book in our fruitier moments, but we're not sure its claim is exactly rock solid – apparently there are these other objects filled with paper adorned with words and pictures that some people call books too.
Just Wikipedia'd these "books"; it looks like they've been around since, like, some time BC – a bit before Zuck's time.
It's possible that Facebook merely means the suffix "-book" - but then we imagine Apple would have a little something to say about that too.
