Facebook found itself at the center of another massively publicized controversy last week, when it announced a change to its terms of service (ToS) that would give the social networking service the right to retain material posted by its users in perpetuity. The change was actually slipped in several weeks prior, but the blogosphere picked up on it the weekend of Valentine’s Day, and once again we were off to the races. Blog articles led to angry Facebook groups, which led to articles in the mainstream media. In fact, the furor built to such a point that Facebook was forced to roll back to its former ToS last Wednesday.

Every time Facebook makes a major change — originally it was the introduction of the Orwellian news feed — it seems that college students across the nation are instantly up in arms. In this case, though, the ToS changes were likely made at the behest of Facebook’s legal team in order to reflect data retention policies already in place, rather than as the result of some grand evil scheme to own everyone’s banal status updates and embarrassing drunk party photos.

Why? Well, think about it: Like any gigantic website, Facebook undoubtedly has an extensive backup system in place. These backups are very good things, as they prevent the loss of any information at the hands of any number of technical problems that can and do go wrong with large, distributed information systems. I can only imagine the enraged groups that would pop up should an un-backed-up database server fail at Facebook and result in the loss of countless user accounts, posts, photos and other content. In the “web 2.0” information society of today, we demand 100 percent up time for our main sites, and when even a byte of our precious data is lost, heads must roll. With backups, Facebook is protecting itself and improving our experience in using their site.

However, because good backup systems are designed to prevent the loss of data, deleting all of a user’s data on demand becomes much more difficult. If you register an account now and then request its deletion in October, deleting it on the “live,” current database won’t delete you entirely; it will be several more months before the months of old backups cycle out of existence.

And then there’s the matter of “public” data that you create while using Facebook. In the course of any given month, an average user may make several comments on discussion threads, tag a dozen people in photos, and post many messages onto people’s walls. If you delete your account, deleting those public contributions would certainly distort the historical record and could embarrass other people as well. So, in short, put down your pitchforks: Although the new ToS was certainly badly-worded, it was not malicious nor rights-depriving at all. Whatever the new revision of the terms ends up being, I hope the Facebook legal team will be able to reflect these common-sense procedures in a language that everyone is able to understand more easily. RLD