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Facebook tweaks terms of use based on feedback, asks for more

Facebook is planning to update its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. The company has responded to feedback, made some changes, and is now asking for more comments from users.
Written by Emil Protalinski, Contributor

Last month, Facebook announced it will once again be updating its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. The company gave users a week to give feedback. After examining the thousands of comments it received, Facebook has made further tweaks to its terms of use document, and has opened up another comment period. This one ends at 5:00 PM PDT on April 27, 2012.

Here's what Facebook had to say about today's update, in a post titled STATEMENT OF RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES UPDATE:

Thank you for taking the time to read and give feedback on the proposed changes to our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR). Our SRR (commonly known as terms of use) explains the commitments we make to you, our users, and you make to us when you use our service. Unlike other Internet companies, we propose updates to our SRR and give our users an opportunity to comment before they go into effect. Your insights and perspectives are really valuable to us, enabling us to respond to your questions and make substantive changes to address your concerns before changes are implemented.

Today we are releasing revised changes to the SRR that reflect changes based on your comments. Even where we did not make revisions, we want to provide you with an explanation of the original change. In fact, many of your comments asked for explanations rather than for changes.

We are re-opening our comment period starting today so that you will have an opportunity to post comments about our new proposed changes. Substantive and relevant comments about specific changes can help us determine whether to incorporate or reconsider a particular proposal or whether a vote is needed.

To see all the changes, you can view this 9-page document: PDF. I haven't had the time to go everything yet, but I did note that the controversial book trademark is still there.

The purple changes are those from the first time around. The blue ones are the new ones. We'll see how much the document changes again, if at all.

If you want to comment on the latest changes, pick your language: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish, Korean, and Portuguese. So far, most of the comments are just complaints about Timeline.

"We hope you find these responses helpful, and hope that we have addressed your concerns in the responses and our revisions," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. "Your trust is extremely important to us. Remember that, as always, you can receive notice of any future changes to our SRR by liking our Site Governance Page."

The last time Facebook updated its SSR document was in April 2011.

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