New Facebook needs a second look from users

Facebook layout changes often make for popular status updates. Yet, although the changes we’ve seen this past year have been tumultuous, the small layout changes are incomparable to the biggest change the company enacted during 2010: Facebook now owns everything a user publishes. Once again, Facebook users are paying attention to the wrong changes.

While most users were  passively annoyed with changes to a well-working model, some were more outspoken with their dissatisfation (“Is this Facebook for ants? How am I supposed to read status updates when the text is a full point smaller?”)

Negative responses to new font sizes, differing “wall” styles and modifications to the way others view your recent activity pale in comparison to the outrage over the new Facebook layout, which proudly displays a user’s five most recently tagged pictures — usually not the most flattering — and contains a small, self-promoting blurb on top of status updates.

As users were acclimating to these changes, though, they inadvertently let one huge change slip by.

While users were arguing about the minute details of Facebook’s changes, the website quietly made one change that has slipped past its users without much disagreement.

If you’re like me, when there are 18 amendments under the “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities,” you just click “I accept” and go with the odds that you didn’t just give away your first-born child.

Let me summarize clause No. 7 of Facebook’s new privacy policy: By using Facebook, each user agrees that regardless  of whether that drunk party picture is removed,  that immature status update passive aggressively dedicated to an ex-boyfriend is hidden or the account is deleted altogether, Facebook owns everything published — forever.

So that ever-present “Did anyone just feel that earthquake?” status belongs eternally to Mark Zuckerberg.  Zuckerberg also owns that note posted during finals week when you were avoiding studying for organic chemistry and revealed a little more than you intended. That note is saved, even when you hit the “x” button and have moved onto a more “mature” junior year.

I didn’t see very many statuses that said: “Did anyone read the new privacy policies? In clause No. 7 it said this status now belongs to Facebook Inc.”

But more important than font changes and layout rearrangements is the fact that every embarrassing picture vomiting by the toilet or quoting mainstream song lyrics as if you’d thought of it are now the intellectual property of Zuckerberg.

I guess users were right in resisting change, just not in the way we thought.

Lauren Yun is a junior majoring in psychology .