It seems that everyone is getting their panties in a bunch due to Facebook’s Terms of Service.

Well, actually, they don’t matter. When you upload your data, you are giving your data to a third party, and they can do whatever they want with it. You have almost no control over your own, personal, data when you publish it on the internet. The service can, for instance, go out of business. They can also delete your account. Furthermore, they probably have something in their TOS that they can make money off of your content.

This is not only the case for Facebook. Flickr has almost the same. So does YouTube, Twitter, …

Not only that, but also the fact that everything, and I really mean everything, is indexed and searchable via Google. Facebook opened their doors a few months ago, so that all their pages are indexable. Try searching for someone who doesn’t have a personal site or other websites that score high in Google. I bet you’ll find their facebook profile scoring high in the ranking. Furthermore, try doing an image search. Yep, that’s a profile picture you see, scoring high. And guess what? Even if Facebook had no such TOS, it would still be there in Google. And in their cache. For all to see. Let me remind you that Google remembers everything. Forever. (Ok, I know, not completely correct, but it’s just to make my point.)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against Google, or Facebook, or Twitter for that matter. I like their services a lot. It are these sites that make the internet to what it is now. A super medium to communicate with a lot of people.

By the way, since there was so much to do about the TOS of Facebook, they reverted it. But I don’t think that will be a permanent thing. And it shouldn’t be, because once you live your online life by the rule that everything you post on the net, should be readable for everyone (including your grandmother), there is nothing to fear.

Or is there?