Facebook terms and conditions: why you don't own your online life

Did you read the terms when you joined Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn? Oliver Smith explains how social networks effectively own your online content.

 When joining a social network, you are likely to spend more time considering which photo you will use on your profile than reading the lengthy terms of service document. And yet, off-putting though Facebook's 14,000-word terms of service and data use policy might be, it is a legal contract between you and the social network. Do you know what you've signed up for?

Last month, users of Instagram reacted with anger at proposed changes to the company's terms that would give the mobile photo-sharing app the right to use member's photos in advertising campaigns.

In some ways, the change was a positive step. It eschewed traditional legal language, instead using clear terminology to precisely explain what the company would and would not do with its members' content. But that clarity made obvious the lengths to which the company might go in order to monetise the free service. Even after Instagram had reversed its decision, removing the controversial elements from their new terms of service, some users still closed their accounts in protest.

What rights have users granted to online services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google? Does posting content on these networks mean forfeiting your ownership of your photos, for example?

A photo posted on Twitter remains the intellectual property of the user but Twitter's terms give the company "a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense)". In practice, that gives Twitter almost total control over the image and the ability to do just about anything with it. The company claims the right to use, modify or transmit it your photo any way.  

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Looking at photographs of yourself on Facebook is good for you, study finds

Facebook is good for you because looking at photographs of yourself is a way of dispelling bad moods and treating mental health issues, according to new research.  

 Dr Alice Good, of the University of Portsmouth, has found that almost 90 per cent of users of the social network access the site to look at their own wall posts and 75 per cent look at their own photos when they are feeling low.

She said that such "self-soothing" use of Facebook is beneficial to the user's mood, especially if they are prone to feeling low.

This contradicts previous research which suggests that looking at Facebook can be bad for your mental health.

The survey of 144 Facebook users found that people often use the social network to reminisce, using old photos and wall posts as a form of comfort.

Looking back at older photos and wall posts was the main activity and the one that made them happiest.  

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Apple's Schiller blasts Android on eve of Samsung's Galaxy S4 launch

Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller attacked Google's "fragmented" Android software and its biggest adopter, Samsung Electronics, a day before the Korean firm takes the wraps off its latest flagship smartphone in the United States.

 The attack by Apple's marketing chief on a rival, on the eve of the Samsung Galaxy S4's global premier in New York, underscores the extent of the pressure piled upon a company that once stood the undisputed leader of the smartphone arena, but ceded its crown to Samsung in 2012.

Mr Schiller, in an interview on Wednesday, told Reuters that Google's own research showed the vast majority of Android users were stuck on older versions of the software, and that Samsung's new phone itself may debut with a year-old operating system that will need updating.

"With their own data, only 16pc of Android users are on year-old version of the operating system," he said. "More than 50pc are still on software that is two years old. A really big difference."

Mr Schiller said fragmentation, or the host of customised versions of Android in the marketplace, poses a problem for consumers.

Every version of Android's operating system update has to be tested to ensure a good fit for a multiplicity of handset makers before it can be widely released by the handset makers, which slows updates. That's because some manufacturers, such as Amazon.com, employ heavily customised versions.  

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Apple in extraordinary attack on Samsung's Android operating system ahead of Galaxy S4 launch

Phil Schiller, the second most powerful executive at Apple, has made an extraordinary attack on Google’s Android software just before Samsung – the biggest user of the software – launches its new Galaxy S4 smartphone.   

 Mr Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing and de facto number two, said that Google's own research showed the vast majority of Android users were stuck on older versions of the software, and that Samsung's new Galaxy S4 may itself be introduced with an out-of-date operating system that will need updating.

"With their own data, only 16 per cent of Android users are on year-old version of the operating system," he said. "More than 50pc are still on software that is two years old. A really big difference," he told Reuters.

Mr Schiller said the fragmentation - the number of versions of the Android operating system out in the marketplace - is in itself a problem, adding:

"And that extends to the news we are hearing this week that the Samsung Galaxy S 4 is being rumoured to ship with an OS that is nearly a year old," he said. "Customers will have to wait to get an update."

He continued: “When you take an Android device out of the box, you have to sign up to nine accounts with different vendors to get the experience iOS comes with. They don't work seamlessly together."  

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Google boss Eric Schmidt to visit Burma

The Google boss Eric Schmidt is to visit Burma next week, a country of great untapped internet and mobile phone potential.  

Google's executive chairman will be the first tech company boss to visit since reforms that prompted Western nations to ease sanctions following decades of military dictatorship.

Since Burma's military stepped aside and a quasi-civilian government was installed in 2011, setting off a wave of political and economic reforms, the country has enjoyed a surge of interest from overseas businesses.

The country - also known as Myanmar - is the last virgin territory for businesses in Asia, with untapped markets including the telecoms sector: mobile penetration in the country of 60 million is estimated to be only 5-10 per cent.

The country's planned modernisation of telecoms infrastructure and expected boom in mobile phone usage will pave the way for the entry of companies such as Google, which could profit greatly through sales of cheap smartphones built around its Android platform.

"Eric (Schmidt) is visiting several countries in Asia to connect with local partners and Googlers who are working to improve the lives of many millions of people across the region by helping them get online and access the world's information for the first time in the next few years," Google said in a statement. His trip will also take in India.  

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Facebook bullying: 19-year-old men are most frequent victims of trolling

A study has revealed that 19-year-old men are the biggest victims of online bullying, the majority of which takes place on Facebook.  

After Facebook, Twitter was the next most frequent face for bullying - or trolling - to take place.

The study revealed that 85 per cent of 19-year-old men had experienced some form of online bullying.

Of all the teenagers who said they had been bullied, only 37 per cent had reported it to the social network where it took place.

Only 17 per cent said that their first reaction would be to tell their parents, and just 1 per cent said it would be to tell their teacher.

Of those who told the study they had been bullied, 87 per cent said it had happened on Facebook, 19 per cent on Twitter and 13 per cent on BlackBerry Messenger.  

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Women's have-it-all fantasy often spells heartbreak

Facebook chief Sheryl Sandberg’s 'Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead' ignores the sorry fate of those who miss out on motherhood.   

 The difficulty with a successful woman setting out to write a book about work and ambition is that half her target audience won’t know what she’s talking about because they’re too busy trying to make ends meet. The other half will hate her because she’s successful.

Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook and an Alpha female, is running this gauntlet right now, thanks to her controversial new book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.

I once spoke at a glitzy event in New York on much the same theme. It was sponsored by a clothing company, which planned to sell women’s officewear in the interval. While the Mrs Alphas were sipping their soya lattes and debating whether they really could have it all, I popped backstage and got talking to some of the sales staff.

Mainly Hispanic and white women from poorer boroughs, they told me they were lucky if the clothing company let them have three weeks off after they gave birth. They didn’t want to leave their newborns, but they had bills to pay. The new infant would either be left with a family member or placed in production-line daycare with as many as 100 other babies. In the industrialised world, the United States is the only nation without a paid parental leave policy. Instead, mothers are eligible for something called, unbelievably, “sickness and disability”.

I felt distinctly queasy as I returned to the podium to banter about the challenges of balancing a career and motherhood. Did the privileged women in that hall ever spare a thought for the weary mum of three handing them a fancy linen jacket to try on?    

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Should iPads be banned at the dinner table?

Parents are increasingly buying themselves a quiet meal out by hooking the children up to iPads and other tablet devices. Is this right? asks Henry Yates.

Pizza Express, Cheltenham branch. Lunchtime, any given Saturday. This should be a scene of cheerful anarchy. Children should be jousting with breadsticks, rutting the salt cellars with plastic dinosaurs, interrupting their parents, irrevocably staining their clothes and suddenly needing the loo just as the starters arrive. Essentially, it should feel like a circus with refreshments.

Instead, though the restaurant is packed with families, there’s silence. After six years soundtracked by thin, reedy shrieks, you might imagine I’d embrace this. I don’t. It’s eerie, like a deleted scene from Children of the Corn.

The cause is clear. At the tables all around us, children’s glazed faces are lit by tablet screens. Inanimate, bar a flicker of frustration when an Angry Bird overshoots its target, interacting with their parents in grunts and shrugs, this is a family enjoying lunch together in its loosest, most depressing sense.

In this context, my own kids – scribbling away on colouring sheets with standard-issue Pizza Express crayons – look quaint and anachronistic, one evolutionary step from cloth-capped Victorian urchins playing with peg dolls. Maybe so, but I’m still convinced they’re getting the better deal.

This is the age of the tablet. These are boom times for Apple’s iPad,Google’s Nexus and Amazon’s Kindle Fire (and the endless variants thereof). According to a spokesman for parent company Dixons, there were days on the run-up to last year’s so-called ‘tablet Christmas’ when PC World and Currys were shifting one every second. Faced with those kind of numbers, you suspect that resistance is futile.

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Galaxy S4 hands-on review: Samsung launches ‘complete package’ to take on Apple

The Samsung Galaxy S4 knows when you’re looking at it and when you’re going up stairs – it’s evolutionary genius.

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 is not obviously that different from the S3 – at first sight you might even think they were the same. But using the new device, which will launch in the UK in April, makes it clear that this is the first of a new generation of smartphones.

It’s not just that it’s got 4G, NFC and all the features which are now ‘table stakes’ for phone manufacturers. Or that it packs in a far larger screen into a package that’s actually slightly smaller than its predecessor.

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LinkedIn hacker 'also stole 1.5m passwords from dating site eHarmony'

The computer hacker behind the theft of almost 6.5 million passwords from LinkedIn is also responsible for publishing up to 1.5 million passwords stolen from the popular dating website eHarmony, it has emerged.

The hacker, who posted lists containing a total of 8 million passwords on a web forum run by a company in Moscow that specialises in "password recovery" software, uses the online alias “dwdm”. He appealed to fellow hackers for help converting the passwords into a usable form.

Experts said that the fact that some of the passwords included the phrase “eharmony” indicated they were taken from the online dating website, which has more than 20 million members worldwide.

The firm confirmed on Wednesday that its security had been breached after it was first reported by the technology news website Ars Technica.

“After investigating reports of compromised passwords, we have found that a small fraction of our user base has been affected,” it said in a blog post.

It said it would contact affected members and reset their passwords.

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Why women constantly lie about life on Facebook

Women consistently lie on social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter to make their lives appear more exciting, a survey has found.

Researchers found that at least one in four women exaggerated or distorted what they are doing on social media once a month.

The survey of 2000 women found they mostly pretended to be out on the town, when in fact they are home alone, and embellished about an exotic holiday or their job.

The most common reasons for women to write “fibs” included worrying their lives would seem “boring”, jealousy at seeing other people’s more exciting posts and wanting to impress their friends and acquaintances.

Psychologists tonight suggested that as people attempt to “stay connected” on social media, they can in fact “paradoxically” be left “more isolated”.

They also said that the “more we try to make our lives seem perfect, the less perfect we feel”.

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Average broadband speed trebles in four years

The average broadband speed in the UK has trebled in the last four years, Ofcom research has revealed.

Residential fixed-line broadband reached an average speed of 12Mbps in November 2012, the most recent date for which figures are available.

This was an increase of 34 per cent (3.1Mbps) in the six months from May to November, as take-up of “superfast” services increased.

The speed more than trebled in the three years from November 2008, when the average speed stood at 3.6Mbps.

Average speeds continue to go up as more customers migrate to higher-speed packages. By November 2012, 77 per cent of fixed-line broadband users were on packages which advertised speed of at least “up to” 10 Mbps, up from 58 per cent in November 2011.

In the same period, the proportion with broadband connections classed as “superfast” – ie with an advertised speed of up to 30 Mbps – rose from 5 per cent to 13 per cent.

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Can I use Windows 7 software with Windows 8?

A reader asks if he can use Windows 7 software with Windows 8.

A friend has just purchased a Windows 8 laptop, but cannot now afford to purchase updated versions of all the software she uses. I know that W7 had a facility called Virtual PC, whereby you could partition your hard-drive and load an alternative operating system but I can’t find out if this is available in W8. Is there a Virtual PC solution for W8? Following on from this, can you access data files on partitions other than the one that you have booted-up from?
Colin Smith. By email

New versions of Windows often cause problems with older applications but this time around there have been fewer casualties. Before your friend gets too involved with Virtual PCs and partitions she should check the Windows Compatibility centre (http://goo.gl/uAvZo), which has a large and growing database of products and where available, links to patches and upgrades.

In the end, though, running an older version of Windows on her PC may be the only solution, but a Virtual Machine (VM) and partitioning or multi-booting are two quite different things. A VM is a PC simulation program that runs inside Windows, in which you can install another version of Windows. In other words it is a PC within a PC. Multi-booting involves dividing the hard drive into two or more partitions, creating one or more virtual drives, and installing a second copy of Windows, or any other supported operating system, on the new partition. All you have to do is select which system boots up immediately after switch on. In both cases the alternative operating system should be able to read and write data stored elsewhere on the host drive.

On balance, and if there is sufficient free space on a hard drive, multi booting is usually the simpler option and there are some easy to follow instructions at: http://goo.gl/JxPxw. Windows Virtual PC has been replaced by Hyper-V in W8 (http://goo.gl/Wf2Zk) and there are several third party alternatives but VMs can be quite tricky to set up and are probably best avoided by novices looking for an easy life.

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Will WiFi affect my pacemaker?

A reader worries that WiFi may affect his pacemaker. It almost certainly won't.

We have had a desktop computer for many years, but I have recently bought a laptop and at the moment am only using it to play games. I would like to connect it to the Internet while away from home by using Wi-Fi but I have a pacemaker and am wary at any side effects this may cause. Clive Delamore, by email

You should really address this type of question to your consultant or cardiologist but the fact is you are being constantly exposed to a very wide range of radio frequency signals, many of them a great deal more powerful than the relatively weak emissions from laptops and wireless routers. Pacemakers are designed to operate in this kind of environment, which includes the all-enveloping sea of RF radiation coming from mobile phones and base stations, emergency and public service two-way radios, television and radio transmissions, cab offices, wireless hotspots - even those in hospitals - and countless other sources. Nevertheless there are plenty of reports of pacemaker users who claim that they have been affected by wireless signals so you shouldn’t take chances and adhere to the ‘6-inch’ rule, issued by a number of organisations, including the British Heart Foundation (http://goo.gl/2az7Q) and manufacturers of Wi-Fi products, like Apple, This basically says you shouldn’t put any wireless or electrical device, or strong magnets closer than 15cm or 6-inches to your pacemaker, but again, I must stress that you should talk to an expert.

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Twitter study: Women tweet more but men complain more

Women tweet more but men are bigger complainers, according to a new study of Twitter use.

Women on Twitter talk more about personal matters, television programmes and work, the study found, while men are most likely to tweet about sport, gaming and news

When it comes to tweets related to brands, women are far more likely than men to be entering competitions, while men are much more likely than women to be complaining.

Women tweet around 15 times a day, on average, compared with nine updates per day from men, according to the study of 1,000 British Twitter accounts by Brandwatch.

"Many studies have shown that men and women use more similar language online than offline, so we were surprised to see such clear differences in the results," said Edward Crook, an analyst at Brandwatch. "140 characters encourages many of the non-standard features of spoken language, which could explain this divide.

"It is clear though that men and women are both discussing different topics on Twitter and using different language to do so."

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