Snopes.com , also known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a website that covers urban legends, Internet rumors, e-mail forwards, scams, and other stories of unknown or questionable origin. This popular web site receives 300,000 visits a day due to being a well-known resource for validating and debunking such stories in American popular culture. The site is organized by topic and includes a message board where stories and pictures of questionable veracity may be posted.
The same rumors seem to circulate in a slightly different form a couple of times a year or questions become a subject of conversation for the online platform Facebook. Here is how they are debunked by Snopes and the details:
- [Rumor] Protect your copyright or privacy rights on Facebook by posting a particular legal notice to your Facebook wall.
Facebook users cannot retroactively negate any of the privacy or copyright terms they agreed to when they signed up for their accounts, nor can they unilaterally alter or contradict any new privacy or copyright terms instituted by Facebook, simply by posting a contrary legal notice on their Facebook walls. The fact that Facebook is now a publicly traded company (i.e., a company that has issued stocks which are traded on the open market) or an “open capital entity” has nothing to do with copyright protection or privacy rights. Any copyright or privacy agreements users of Facebook have entered into with that company prior to its becoming a publicly traded company or changing its policies remain in effect: they are neither diminished nor enhanced by Facebook’s public status.
- [Rumor] Facebook Messenger requires the acceptance of an alarming amount of personal data and direct control over your mobile device.
Washington Post noted, “many of these permission requests are neither uncommon nor unreasonable and aren’t really much different or more onerous than the permissions required by the main Facebook app itself.”
- [Rumor] Facebook is getting rid of its privacy policy.
Whether you’ve been using the setting or not, the best way to control what people can find about you on Facebook is to choose who can see the individual things you share.
- [Rumor] Facebook will be charging monthly fees.
The claim that Facebook will initiate user charges was the bait to lure people to the protest page and its hidden malicious payload; there are no plans afoot to require payment from those who use the site.
