Cash4Gold.com is a website that offers you cash for turning in your jewelry. A former employee of Cash4Gold left a whistleblower post on ComplaintsBoard.com. The ex-employee left the post this past November and Consumerist pointed out the post this past February.
Michele Liberis is the ex-employee that left the post and she was sued for defamation. Consumerist and ComplaintsBoard.com was also added to the lawsuit as co-defendants. Cash4Gold is trying to force Liberis and another former employee Vielka Nephew to remove the information from ComplaintsBoard.com.
We decided not to remove the post, and instead replied with a 2,400-word request for additional details that might back up Cash4Gold’s claims. Reason: we felt that killing a post we deemed to be both credible and newsworthy would be a disservice to our readers and a betrayal of our responsibility as consumer journalists.
In that letter, and in several follow ups, we’ve asked Cash4Gold and its lawyers for evidence to support their broad assertions of falsehood. We’ve also lauded the company for starting its own blog, and pushed it to continue to join “the public debate” about these issues.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is about to file a complaint against Facebook with the Federal Trade Commission. The complain is about the new Facebook terms of service that reports that user data will be kept by the social network even after deactivation. Zuckerberg explained that Facebook does this so that data such as sent messages don’t get deleted if a user deactivates their account. I really see nothing wrong with this. If people don’t like Facebook’s TOS, don’t share data.
“We think that Facebook should go back to its original terms of service,” stated EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg. The commotion around the controversy was started by the Consumerist. Over 38,000 people have joined a group that object to the changes in the TOS.
However, other social media websites like YouTube, MySpace, and Twitter state that content distribution will cease if acconts are deactivated. Perhaps they haven’t spelled it out in the proper legal terms that Facebook does. I don’t know how MySpace messaging works, but if anyone has an account can they let me know whether they have messages in their inbox or friend requests pending from users that no longer have an account? Leave it in the comments.
I knew there was something fishy about the Consumerist article that claimed Facebook had the rights to use your content for any reason even if you deactivate your account. Gawker’s network built itself on stirring up controversy. In this case, Consumerist took advantage of people fearing that Facebook is becoming too much of a “big brother” social network. No need to freak out about your photos on Facebook as long as you can trust your friends.
“When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information,” stated Mark Zuckerberg on the Facebook blog. “One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.”
Facebook Beacon on the other hand was a blatant violation of privacy. Sometimes it is good to keep Facebook on their toes about their TOS. Well done in spotting the changes, Consumerist.
