After last week’s user rebel­lion that upended Facebook’s attempt to change its terms of ser­vice to grant itself a per­pet­ual license to all pho­tos, videos and copy­righted mate­r­ial posted by its mem­bers — some­how, Terms of Use Rebel­lion doesn’t have the same his­tor­i­cal ring as Whiskey Rebel­lion — the com­pany is angling to turn the inci­dent into a net pos­i­tive by call­ing on its users to help for­mu­late a “bill of rights” to gov­ern the social-networking giant.

It’s a bold, gutsy and unprece­dented move, the kind of envelope-pushing move we’ve seen in the past from founder-CEO Mark Zucker­berg. The pro­posed Face­book Prin­ci­ples cover top­ics such as the “free­dom to share and con­nect,” pri­vacy rights, “fun­da­men­tal equal­ity” and “own­er­ship and con­trol of infor­ma­tion.” Face­book users — there are about 175 mil­lion of us around the globe — are being invited to review, com­ment on and ulti­mately vote on the pro­pos­als in “a vir­tual town hall” over the next 30 days.

If more than 7,000 users com­ment on any pro­posed change, it would go to a vote. Trou­ble is, they’ve inten­tion­ally set the bar impos­si­bly high. The mea­sures would be bind­ing to Face­book only if more than 30 per­cent of active users vote. Based on Facebook’s cur­rent size, that would be nearly 53 mil­lion peo­ple. By com­par­i­son, a group cre­ated to protest Facebook’s new terms has roughly 139,600 mem­bers. (I’m one of them.)

I’ve also joined these groups (and encour­age you to con­sider doing like­wise), which are still quite small:

• Face­book Bill of Rights and Respon­si­bil­i­ties (88,410 members)

• Face­book Town Hall: Pro­posed Face­book Prin­ci­ples (9,331 members)

• Face­book Town Hall: Pro­posed State­ment of Rights & Respon­si­bil­i­ties (8,548 mem­bers — these group names are too sim­i­lar, in my view)

Here’s what I wrote back on Sept. 7, 2007, about a Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web:

At Office 2.0 yes­ter­day I heard about this sig­nif­i­cant announce­ment: A Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web put out by four Web 2.0 pio­neers: Marc Can­ter (who co-founded Our­me­dia with me); uber-blogger Robert Scoble; Joseph Marc, the head tech guy at social net­work­ing com­pany Plaxo; and TechCrunch founder Michael Arring­ton. It’s short and sweet:

We pub­licly assert that all users of the social web are enti­tled to cer­tain fun­da­men­tal rights, specifically:

• Own­er­ship of their own per­sonal infor­ma­tion, including:
  • their own pro­file data
  • the list of peo­ple they are con­nected to
  • the activ­ity stream of con­tent they create;
• Con­trol of whether and how such per­sonal infor­ma­tion is shared with oth­ers; and
• Free­dom to grant per­sis­tent access to their per­sonal infor­ma­tion to trusted exter­nal sites.

Sites sup­port­ing these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syn­di­cate their own pro­file data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the ser­vice, using a per­sis­tent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syn­di­cate their own stream of activ­ity out­side the site;
• Allow their users to link from their pro­file pages to exter­nal iden­ti­fiers in a pub­lic way; and
• Allow their users to dis­cover who else they know is also on their site, using the same exter­nal iden­ti­fiers made avail­able for lookup within the service.

User con­trol of their own data. The right to bring it over to other net­works. The right to remove your stuff per­ma­nently. The Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web laid out these prin­ci­ples clearly. Now it’s time to work with and pres­sure com­pa­nies — with Face­book at the front of the pack — to live up to these common-sense standards.

More:

• Stowe Boyd: An Open Let­ter On Best Prac­tices And Principles

• Marc Can­ter: Face­book is grad­u­ally get­ting there

•  jill/txt: [face­book democ­ra­ti­sa­tion: the bal­ance between com­mu­nity and business]

• Face­book press release: Face­book Opens Gov­er­nance of Ser­vice and Pol­icy Process to Users

• San Jose Mer­cury News: Face­book to cre­ate ‘bill of rights’

• Asso­ci­ated Press: Face­book to let users give input on policies

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.