You have probably read about the recent attempt by Facebook to modify its terms of service (TOS), which was reported on DailyTech last week.  The move by the world’s largest social networking site caused a predictable uproar, which forced the site to quickly back paddle and revert back to its previous TOS – at least for the time being.

Such a move understandably left more than a few loyal users feeling disgruntled or disillusioned, while others have promptly deleted their Facebook accounts all together.

In the midst of the general cacophony of unhappiness were some interesting views which provoked a double-take from me.  Let me highlight some of them here.

Kara Swisher, who is the co-executive editor of the All Things Digital website was almost brutal in presenting her view; “If you send something to 400 people and publish it, it's publishing – just the way the Wall Street Journal is. I think people don't realize it’s publishing... it's not private anymore."

Liza Porteus Viana, writing at FoxNews.com agreed that anything shared on a Facebook page is essentially shared for life.  Essentially, users should not be expecting privacy after sharing photos and other information about themselves with hundreds of their friends.

At the end of the day though, this could well be nothing more than an overzealous legal team trying to better protect the social networking site against the frivolous lawsuits of our generation.  Facebook could have realized that it was promising more than it could deliver legally as a result of its various data-sharing schemes; the possibility of lingering caches across its server farms, or even data backups that might remain after the deletion of an account.

Countering this argument, of course, is that designing a proper system for removing content quickly and permanently should hardly be rocket science.  It is also logical that if a person leaves a service, it would not be an unreasonable expectation that their content be deleted in tandem.

What are my own thoughts on this matter?  Bearing in mind just how easy it would be to track specific Facebook accounts and cache everything, the question I’ll pose would be just how hard is it to create software to archive everything ever “published” on any Facebook account?  When that happens, would Facebook be liable as an accomplice for copyright infringement then?  

To keep things complicated, let’s leave off with a conspiracy theory:  perhaps the attempt to modify the TOS is simply a prelude to Facebook launching some snazzy new service.