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A years-old Facebook hoax is making the rounds again, giving users false hope that a simple status update will lock down their accounts and protect the photos and videos they share.
The status contains a sentence that intends to prevent Facebook from using your content. According to the message, pasting the message on your wall prevents the social media company from using your photos or anything else on your profile.
The problem? It doesn't work.
Here's the status:
According to Facebook’s terms and conditions, your photos and videos are fair game — sometimes.
“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,” the site’s terms read.
That means Facebook does not own users’ content, but the site does have permission to use any photos, videos or statuses that are posted publicly.
However, there’s hope for social savvy users who don’t want to broadcast their lives beyond their close friends and family and don’t want the site to have access to their content. If you don’t want your photos or videos shared by other entities, you can tighten the security settings on your account, making some or all of your posts private.
The hoax dates as far back as November 2012, when Facebook noticed that status becoming so widespread, the social networking site released a statement seeking to clarify.
“There is a rumor circulating that Facebook is making a change related to ownership of users’ information or the content they post to the site. This is false. Anyone who uses Facebook owns and controls the content and information they post, as stated in our terms. They control how that content and information is shared. That is our policy, and it always has been,” the company said at the time.
Snopes addressed the hoax status back in 2011. The message seems to appear at least once a year -- and every year, thousands of people are tricked into sharing the message on their page.
Here's an excerpt from the Snopes article:
Users can read the site’s full terms of service, here. If they find something they don’t like, users can lobby for a chance through Facebook’s Site Governance section.