In this activity from the eLearning Toolkit, we were tasked to explore social software and consider the following:
- Who “owns” materials posted by members?
- For what purposes can these materials be used?
- Would using each site be appropriate with your students?
- In your opinion, how well are the privacy interests of members represented?
This activity turned out to be a much more lengthy exploration than I expected. Legal terms of websites are extensive and the legalese is sometimes difficult to parse, and my blog entry just touches upon the tip of the iceberg. In order to maintain some order and framework, I related the activity to the concepts I am working with for my upcoming ETEC565A assignments of digital story and content module.
For these assignments, I have been exploring operations security (OPSEC) and the use of social media. OPSEC is defined by the Department of National Defence as “the principle of safeguarding the integrity of a military operation or activity, and/or the safety of CF members and other personnel involved in the military operation or activity” (DND, 2008). OPSEC defines everything the military does, from initial tenders to industry, to planning, to deployment and debriefing (Hobson, 2011). Information that is inadvertently – or purposefully – released can contribute to injury or death, or contribute otherwise to mission failures.
Not all material needs to be classified in order to provide information. Reflecting back on my experience with the Picasa Web Album, for example, illustrates the significant amount of data that can be included in the textual metadata of a photograph, ranging from the photography equipment to the date and time the photo was taken, right down to specific GPS coordinates. Depending on one’s perspective, metadata could be a good or a bad thing. It could be an important means to support authorship and copyright information, for example; but inadvertently shared information could easily result in OPSEC violations from a security standpoint. As an illustration of such problems, the following news clip shows concerns related to the GPS coordinates in image metadata as a threat to children’s safety.
In March of 2013, the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) conducted a series of tests on image hosting sites to identify how different image hosting sites treated different forms of metadata on user-uploaded images. Not every feature is equally tested on the different platforms, but looking at the results indicates some interesting differences. Facebook and Twitter for example, each scrub all embedded metadata tested on their respective platforms, whereas Google+ retains everything. Flickr’s free account displays some image metadata on their website, but scrubs information upon upload and download for any images resized from the original (ITPC, 2013).
For this eLearning toolkit activity, I choose to look at the TOS in relation to uploaded image content for four services: Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Flickr. Although it’s quite easy to find the TOS for each of the following four services, sifting through the legalese and determining meaning is not always so clear. For example, each of the services indicates that the user owns the content:
Facebook:
“You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings” (Facebook, 2013).
Twitter:
“…but what’s yours is yours – you own your Content (and your photos are part of that Content)” (Twitter, 2012).
Google+ (A subsidiary service of Google)
“You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. In short, what belongs to you stays yours” (Google, 2014).
Flickr (a subsidiary service of Yahoo):
“You, as a member, maintain all ownership rights to the photos that you upload ” (Yahoo, 2000).
However, each of the services also provide caveats for the service to change, distribute, alter the licencing, or otherwise use the content that the user supposedly still “owns.” I think some of the confusion here may stem from the term “use.”
Facebook:
“When you publish content or information using the Public setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture).”
Twitter:
“We encourage and permit broad re-use of Content. The Twitter API exists to enable this….Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services.”
Google+
“Except as otherwise required by the Google+ Pages Terms, you may not include terms, conditions or non-Google provided technical restrictions on Google+ Pages.”
Flickr:
“…with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Yahoo Services, you grant Yahoo the following worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s)…”
All of the services provide some sort of disclaimer that they are not responsible for any misuse of their content, and their TOS’s are pretty comprehensive in their wording to this extent. One common clause found across many TOS’s that typically receives coverage after any changes to TOSs is the service’s ability to “use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content,” and while this may sound like an overarching appropriation of rights, it generally refers to the making of thumbnails, resizing, advertising, and so on.
After considering the terms of the different services, I feel that due to Flickr’s multiple licencing options available for every image (and choices for different images from the same user or even the same photoset), Flickr is the most respectful of privacy interests of the members they represent. Although as the ITPC (2013) report indicates that Flickr metadata is largely scrubbed from resized photos, the original always remains available, and the licencing is standard across the images. Additionally, because of the multiple options included, I feel like the use of Flickr could be a beneficial learning tool as students start to navigate the many layers of creative commons. “All rights reserved” is the default, and even if you change portions of the licence, you can not take away the attribution requirement. In my opinion, the constellation of options, well defined, and easily accessible on the upload page and easy to change post-uploading, is the most respectful of the privacy interests of members.
Then again, if it is in the OPSEC interests to hide identifying metadata from photos, then Flickr would be the most problematic. It could be that because Facebook scrubs all metadata while at the same time allows high level audience control and sharing permissions, this could be optimal for users concerned with these factors. It all depends on user perspective, and it’s important to be wary.
References
DND (2008). DAOD 2008-4, Public Affairs, Military Doctrine and Canadian Forces Operations. National Defence and the Canadian Forces website. Accessed March 03, 2014 from http://www.admfincs.forces.gc.ca/dao-doa/2000/2008-4-eng.asp
Facebook (2013). Facebook terms of service. Accessed March 06, 2014 from: https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
Google (2014). Policies & principles – Google. Avvessed March 06, 2014 from http://www.google.com/+/policy/pagesterm.html
Hobson, Sharon. Operations security and the public’s need to know. Calgary, AB.: Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute, 2011. Accessed March 02, 2014 from http://www.cdfai.org/PDF/Operations%20Security%20and%20the%20Publics%20Need%20to%20know.pdf
IPTC (2013). Embedded metadata initiative. Accessed March 06, 2014 from: http://www.embeddedmetadata.org/social-media-test-results.php
Twitter (2012). Twitter terms of service. Accessed March 10, 2014 from: https://twitter.com/tos?PHPSESSID=57a411f70b1964a2bc78b82638ba1843
Yahoo (2000). Yahoo terms of service. Accessed March 10, 2014 from: http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/utos-173.html
Interesting activity, eh? Rather eye-opening. But I’m curious as to the basis for this statement:
“the service’s ability to “use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content,” and while this may sound like an overarching appropriation of rights, it generally refers to the making of thumbnails, resizing, advertising, and so on.”
In fact, most social media are monetized by a combination of the data and multimedia contributed by members’ postings. FB in particular is known for selling images to advertisers. Which is why I post most of my photos on Flickr rather than FB (though my Flickr has a Creative Commons licence attached to it).
Thank you the response and for raising the point, John.
In terms of the statement that you highlighted, I interpreted the Facebook TOS to mean that that only the content that had been set to “public” was liable for monetization, whereas those with their profile settings on private could avoid this happening. Twitter, on the other hand, is more forthright about their platform being designed for sharing.
With Flickr, I recall a change to the TOS occurring a while back, and a furor ensuing, to which there was a company response outlining the use as I’ve generalized. I didn’t consult back during this blog post, but upon searching for it, I’ve found the information here: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2011/05/13/at-flickr-your-photos-are-always-yours/ I think what they’re saying here is that for the functionality of their website, they need to be able to resize, modify, display thumbnails images that link back to your work (which could be construed as advertising) and so on… And that while the user agrees to these uses, the content still holds the rights they’ve set.
Because I don’t have a full grasp of all of the legal terms and wordsmithing, I can’t be sure if I’ve interpreted it correctly!
“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”
That’s ALL photos, licenced. All content, in fact. If it’s posted on FB’s server: if it’s merely linked into FB (such as via your own server or something like Flickr) they do not have licence to monetize it.