For over a year now, I’ve had my Facebook account set up so that any posts I made to my personal blog would automatically show up on my Facebook account. I figured it was a nice bit of convenient promotion and — if I ever decided I didn’t want that information up there, I could always remove it or even delete my account.

Facebook has new terms of service that makes me wary of uploading anything I write to the site. It states that pretty much anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook however they want, forever, including sublicensing the content to someone else:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

The terms of service for Facebook used to say that if you removed your content from the site, Facebook’s license automatically expired. The new version actually says that a lot of your content will survive if you terminate your account.

What does that mean for online writers?

I’m not rushing out and pulling down my Facebook profile. But I have re-thought automatically publishing content on the site. I’ve removed the feed from my blog: if I ever want to use that content for something else in the future, I don’t want Facebook making things harder.

I’ll still publish the occasional note and link, but I’m probably going to think a lot harder about exactly what I’m willing to license to Facebook and what has some money-making potential elsewhere.

Want to see more about the changes to Facebook’s terms of service? Check out Consumerist’s post on the subject.

Image Credit — AJC1