After facing an uprising from account holders, Facebook has backed down from changing their terms of use.

The social networking Web site originally updated its terms of use on Feb. 4. According to Consumerist.com, Facebook’s old terms of service had an agreement with users where once the account was deactivated, Facebook could no longer claim any rights on uploaded content. However, the updated terms stated that anything uploaded to the Web site could be used by Facebook, in any way the networking site saw fit.

Facebook users, mostly college students, began making their sentiments known to Facebook’s creator, Mark Zuckerberg.

“I’m really glad that they backed down,” Mary Davis, a junior geology and environmental studies major, said. “It seems like a gross invasion of privacy that Facebook keeps all of your personal information.”

According to The New York Times, Barry Schnitt, a spokesman for Facebook, said the Web site had no intention of owning user information through its new terms of use.

Despite the uproar when Facebook announced these changes, this change in the terms of use by Facebook is generally not unprecedented, according to Professor Madhusudhan Govindaraju, a web contents expert at Binghamton University, and Ph.D. student Michael Head.

Govindaraju and Head cited examples such as credit card agreements versus Web site agreements.

In both of these situations, Govindaraju and Head said, “they can change the contract in almost any way they see fit.”

Many Facebook users decided to take action against the new terms by creating groups on the Web site.

One group, “Facebook claims ownership FOREVER of everything you submit,” was created by University of California at San Diego student Shai Azoulai.

According to Azoulai, the group was created to inform users that the Web site’s terms of use had changed.

“I personally think that social networking is wonderful,” Azoulai said, “but I’ve been concerned for quite some time about the serious privacy concerns that anyone should have when posting information online.”

Azoulai said after the new terms of service were enacted she began to “think of the myriad of ways that personal information could be distributed for profit.”

Another group created in protest of the updated terms of use, “People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS),” discusses the same problem. The group had 117, 325 members by the time of publication.

Julius Harper, a graduate from the University of Southern California and an officer of the group, said he believed the new terms of service were “ridiculous.”

As far as the using information that was archived, Govindaraju and Head said that it is a smaller task than managing the day-to-day activities of Facebook.

“[Web sites like Facebook] bank on their ability to turn what they know about their users into advertising revenue,” Head said. “If Facebook can guess that you are looking to buy a particular textbook this semester because they know what classes you are likely to take, then they can deliver an ad from Barnes and Noble, and charge more for that ad than another advertising service that doesn’t have that knowledge.”