Suicide Machine and Goliath

Jennifer Palmer
suicide.jpg

Facebook has blocked the tiny Dutch start-up, Web 2.0 Suicide Machine and served them with Cease and Desist papers. Facebook claims the service acted in violation of their terms of agreement but Web 2.0 Suicide Machine insists it was merely enabling users of Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn -- and, before all this went down, Facebook -- to quickly and painlessly kill their virtual personae, automating and shortening what is usually a long termination process.  While Facebook allows users to deactivate their accounts, they still keep all of their data stored on their servers. This has been long been an issue for the social media platform. Facebook deemed it a violation that Web 2.0 Suicide Machine used a script to scrape and delete data from the 350 million user strong giant--according to the user agreement Facebook owned every status update, wall photo and comment that a user makes, not to mention all of the contact information they have stored on the site.

In response to the Cease and Desist, Web 2.0 Suicide Machine has vowed to find a way around the ban, so that users who want to kill themselves on Facebook will have the tools to do it.  When an interviewer pointed out to Gordan Savicic, Suicide Machine's "Chief Euthanasia Officer" that the publicity garned by this "David and Goliath" showdown was perhaps well worth the consequences for the fledgling company, Savicic responded:

"This already happened due to their ban. However, we consider this project as a piece of socio-political net-art (with all its consequences)."

 

Image by iboy_daniel on Flickr Courtesy of Creative Commons Licensing.

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Comments

Fact Check

Submitted by linkx on Thu, 01/14/2010 - 16:28.
Facebook does not, as you claim, "[own] every status update, wall photo and comment that a user makes, not to mention all of the contact information they have stored on the site." If you read the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities you will see:

Sharing Your Content and Information

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. In addition:

  1. 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.
  2. When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).
  3. When you add an application and use Platform, your content and information is shared with the application. We require applications to respect your privacy settings, but your agreement with that application will control how the application can use the content and information you share. (To learn more about Platform, read our About Platform page.)
  4. When you publish content or information using the "everyone" setting, it means that everyone, including people off of Facebook, will have access to that information and we may not have control over what they do with it.
  5. We always appreciate your feedback or other suggestions about Facebook, but you understand that we may use them without any obligation to compensate you for them (just as you have no obligation to offer them).

Hmmm

Submitted by Jennifer Palmer on Thu, 01/14/2010 - 17:24.

Perhaps they don't use the word "own" but their terms state that Facebook has,"an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (to)...use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works, and distribute" material as long as it doesn't violate the privacy preferences set by the user.

That "subject only to your privacy settings" phrasing is supposed to make us feel better, but the issue of user privacy is hardly clear on FB.  There have been numerous issues surrounding FB material that was re-published in other contexts. Seeing as how the privacy rules are still unclear, it doesn't bode well that these are used as the guidelines towards determining IP ownership.  

The very nature of the

Submitted by linkx on Thu, 01/14/2010 - 18:41.

The very nature of the Facebook site requires them to have these rights to the content that you place on their site; the whole point of Facebook is that it takes your content and displays it in various ways to various people. In order to do this, they need the rights to "use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works, and distribute" your content - that is what the site is designed to do. That's why people use it.

If you don't like it, don't upload content, change your privacy settings, or delete your account.

Web2.0 Suicide Machine is a really, really cool service! Very creative. The fact that you can watch the script click on things in the server's browser via a flash remote desktop is so cool! And the principle of freeing yourself from social network reality is noble indeed.

But the fact is: it violates Facebook's terms, and those terms are justified.

Facebook, undeniably a social networking "Goliath," has every right to demand that suicidemachine.org stop soliciting credentials from users, logging in as other users, and running scripts on the site. These are the rules that some websites need to have.

I would guess that if I were soliciting credentials for users of realitysandwich.com and had scripts that logged in as various users and manipulated the site, RS would tell me to stop. Right Ken?

No one's saying that Facebook is wrong...

Submitted by Jennifer Palmer on Thu, 01/14/2010 - 21:54.

...or right, for that matter.  As a sometimes IT professional I don't fault them for stopping a script from accessing their servers.  I'd do the same thing (and so would the RS tech team).  I think the larger issue is that it brings up their whole terms of agreement ownership and privacy that FB keeps running across with its users.  It seems, at least in part, that Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is one way to vent steam at a platform that one is nevertheless a part of and couldn't imagine doing without.  The company has only helped "off" around 500 accounts--hardly a drop in the bucket for FB's hundreds of millions.

 

peace,

 

jp

too bad!! I would LOVE to

Submitted by mazigazi on Fri, 01/15/2010 - 12:37.
too bad!! I would LOVE to quit Facebook and wipe my past data. Facebook sucks.

i just want the choice.

Submitted by gillbard525 on Sun, 01/17/2010 - 20:47.

sometimes i think about leaving the institution that is fb, like that old tv series. walking down to the sea taking everything of and disappearing from the social map.

it's not that i hate people it just vexes me the amount of time i waste, future stats are going to show how much time people spent watching tv, eating, sleeping and looking at photos of people they don’t know on fb.

if the time comes that i decide, "i'm not going to heard together with everyone else". it would be nice to know that i could. at the moment it isn't possible to do so but maybe someone could start a fb grope to campaign for it, 10,000 members seems to be the magic number.

this is my first ever post on this, or any other forum/ discussion board. i like it and plan to take part more often, this might be the beginning of something beautiful.

don’t get lost in heaven