Certain legal concepts are also standardized through latin. Honestly, there are plenty of googlable sites out there which explain the Latin terms in the language of your choice if you aren't familiar with them. Half of the people in the protesting facebook groups, probably didn't read the Terms of Service in the first place when they signed up.

@Ben Popken: But under your own terms you can change that at anytime, right?

Since the site presents no cost to users, they hope they can get free content to sell. This free content hinges on their users' willingness to give it to them, which it seems, has its limits.

If Facebook wants to continue selling user access to advertisers, it had better find terms its content providers find reasonable.

Get it?

The problem is with facebook granting itself a perpetual license to all your content. Artist and business people who are sharing their work end up in a situation where they no longer can feel comfortable doing so - no one wants their photos sold to Dave's Adult Diaper Co. billboard, or the poem they wrote about the death of a friend sold to Hallmark. Its not that we think Facebook would do those things, its that the TOS said that they could, if they wanted to.

And since when is telling a company WHY you are unhappy "stupid"? You would prefer that they just stop using it and not say why? Or not tell the company how they could do better? Of course they don't run the company - what's your point?

People who are concerned about agreeing to terms of use that can be very detrimental are not "stupid" - they are thoughtful and smart. People who see an issue from only one perspective and call others stupid without stopping to think... well...

This is crap. Anyone who thinks the internet is a private place is an idiot. If you put it online, it will be seen, and it will be shared, end of story. If it's not facebook just sharing it out, its a marketing company scraping the site to gather the info. IF YOU DONT WANT IT SHARED, DONT PUT IT ONLINE!

If you dont like the way Facebook runs their site, and the FREE SERVICE it provides you, build your own site with as much security as you want and send a link to your friends.

The language used in a ToS is legal language, it is a contract, and thus is written like one. It is not that confusing if you have a basic education and actually WANT to understand it.

As far as putting it up to a vote, that is ridiculous. You don't run the company, you have no financial stake in it if it gets sued and can't defend itself. Most of these users are not lawyers and even fewer have an expertise in this section of law, putting it to a vote is stupid.

I'm ok with them sending out a notification when they change their ToS, most companies do, and more than 99% of people don't read them.

A company blog is hardly an obscure place to post info. Most major companies have blogs now and that is where info to the public is posted. You want to use a website, then learn to use all features of a website.

This whole thing is stupid, and most people are only throwing a fit because it seems like the cool thing to do. Most wouldn't have even noticed if a few self important people, who think they deserve privacy in a public place, didn't speak up.

Besides, facebook did nothing but foster my social retardation. Now I actually have to, I don't know, CONTACT people in real life?

Sometimes this is the case (and sometimes the precise technical meaning of the term matters a lot), but sometimes it's just laziness or habit that keeps lawyers using legal Latin. There's no particular reason "forum non conveniens" couldn't be written as "inconvenient forum" or "inconvenient forum (technically, forum non conveniens)" for a contract clearly meant to be understood by laypeople.

There's also no reason they can't attach a brief glossary to a contract intended for laypeople that has technical terms in it.

There's a movement in the law for "plain English" lawyering, and I *do* think this TOS could use a dose of that. There are clearly some places where the legaleze could be cut down without sacrificing clarity or legal meaning.

My concern is the people who upload way too much stuff on there, I have a facebook account, I have no problem with listing my interests and other things, but I am not going to use it to conduct extremely personal conversations or to post every photo of myself known to man. If someone on there wants to contact me about a personal matter they can use my email address, which is posted right on my facebook account. I have one basic photo up so people can see who I am.

So yeah, it's not "Latin" per se -- fluency in Latin wouldn't necessarily help one understand this -- it's technical legal jargon, some of which happens to be in Latin.

I'd like to see a policy saying that changes in the ToS will: take 48 hours to go into effect, and will be accompanied by a post indicating that the ToS has changed on the frontpage of consumerist.com

Currently, they say "We may update this User Agreement from time to time by posting the modified User Agreement on this page, or elsewhere on our Site. By continuing to use our Site after the modified User Agreement becomes effective, you agree to the modified terms."

And "the onus is on the user to monitor themselves"... isn't this place called the Consumerist? That's about the most anti-consumerist thing I've seen here in ages. Facebook has the right to cover their ass, but to assert unlimited, perpetual and irrevocable license over anything that's posted or even linked through their service is overreaching their authority by an enormous margin and shouldn't be tolerated.

That's not true. You require an email address to register and participate in the site. That's personal data.

In the context of a profession, sometimes it is MUCH easier and more concise to use a predefined term rather than explain it in English (see: engineering, medical, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam), and it's not hard to look up the often long and exhaustive explanation and justification.

How many people will actually close their account as a result of this anyway? Odds are they'll just create or join a group protesting the changes and still upload pics of themselves in horrible situations.

"and the beat goes on..."

Seriously though, like a few others have said, it's easier to use the well-known Latin term than to try to explain it in English. If it's explained in English, it's going to get more complicated, and then people will just complain it's too long. If you don't understand the Latin term, go check Wikipedia. They have good contextual explanations of the legal terms.

Skeptical me thinks that this is a cheap PR stunt that Facebook has no intention of following through.

As for the Latin, its just legal terms that happen to be in latin, not actual latin. Its jargon, technical terms.

We're talking about one of the WORLD'S largest cell providers, here, not some backwater upstart company.

Oh well, good job to the users for not falling victim to lemming syndrome.

@termitehead: Lots of legalese terms are in Latin, since it remains the language of many "learned" professions. A lot of legal issues only make sense to the lawyer types if they use Latin. That's why any sort of service documents contain them.

We need simple language to say what rights we're waiving and what we can expect from the company. Terms of the art are no longer acceptable because users are not lawyers. Users will not bring lawyers with them when ever they want to sign up for a new account online. If it takes too long to explain what a term means, you need to either do a better job or investigate if this particular is even important. If it is, there must be a way to impart that information to the layman.

While i think it's great that consumerist is pointing out FB's TOS changes, it seems somewhat interesting that the Consumerist User Agreement is similar:

Except as otherwise set forth in this User Agreement, by transmitting any public Communication to the Site, you grant Consumer Media an irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, unrestricted, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, reproduce, distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, modify, edit, create derivative works from, incorporate into one or more compilations and reproduce and distribute such compilations, and otherwise exploit such Communications, in all media now known or later developed. You warrant that you have the right to grant these rights to Consumer Media and that you will not post any content that infringes or violates any proprietary, privacy or publicity, or other rights of any party or that violates any law. You hereby waive all rights generally known as "moral rights" in your Communications to the extent they can be waived, under any existing or future law of any jurisdiction.

Just legal Latin. There are some terms of art that are really shockingly difficult to explain or take forever to explain if you don't use the term-of-art. Sometimes there's a very specific, technical meaning attached to the term of art. Sometimes it's just laziness, but sometimes there's good reason -- explaining "per stirpes" takes ages if you can't just say "per stirpes."

(It's not necessarily the Latin that's confusing, either; the term "ademption" is terrifically useful in wills, but you're unlikely to run across it in everyday English, so you're going to need it defined or explained if it's used.)

My examples are will examples which Facebook is unlikely to ever use, but you get the idea. :)

@termitehead: To make sure they get things across to the pedophiles who were trained in Catholic seminaries.