Just trust us.
That's what Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the estimated 175 million users of his social-networking Web site Monday afternoon after the company had stepped into yet another bad-publicity mess of its own creation.
Basically, Zuckerberg told Facebook devotees that he'd never, ever do anything bad with their posted content even though the user agreement says he's perfectly entitled to do so.
"The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work," he wrote in a reassuring-sounding message on the official Facebook blog. "Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment."
Still, that doesn't change the fact that Facebook's Terms of Service the long legal document all users must agree to before they can sign up grants the company "an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or ... (ii) enable a user to Post."
Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users read that scary passage for the first time after the consumer-interest blog Consumerist.com lit up a sleepy holiday weekend on Sunday evening with a posting entitled "Facebook's New Terms Of Service: 'We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.'"