The website, which is devoted to confirming or denying internet rumors, states that copy and pasted statement started making the rounds at the beginning of this year and is most decidedly false. Better safe than sorry.
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Snopes.com, the online whistleblower for social media hoaxes, has a long line of these “share-scams”, that don’t necessarily put you at risk for losing money or actual theft of information, but do cause you a lot of wasted time and effort.
Another similar post claims that people can now pay Facebook to have their information made private. Some even say there’s a paid version of Facebook that keeps your photos and posts private for $5.99 a month.
“You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings”. “If you have not published this statement at least once, you will tacitly allow the use of elements such as your photos as well as the information contained in your profile update”.
That’s common sense. But the copy-and-paste-this-post hoax is a genre unto itself, and it seems to do just fine with posts that don’t make any sense at all.
According to Facebook’s terms and conditions, your photos and videos are fair game – sometimes.
If you happen to see someone else share these messages, be sure to let them know they are fake!
If the company up and chose to take our privacy, douse it with lighter fluid and then toss in a lit match – all without any notice whatsoever – but with the completely unheralded option of snatching it from the fire with a random bunch of sentences pasted into your status update, you’d have heard about it.
“This is false. Anyone who uses Facebook owns and controls the content and information they post, as stated in our terms”, Facebook stated in the post.
There’s even a new one being shared that promotes a “subscription” to keep your profile private. That is our policy, and it always has been.
One of the hoaxes, which resurfaces every couple of years, warns users to post what sounds like a legally binding statement to their feeds that prohibits from Facebook using their photos, content or personal information without users’ permission.
Snopes addressed the hoax status back in 2011. That change did not, as the post claimed, “delete all privacy settings”.
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This subscription rumour began on Facebook in 2013, and the site still isn’t charging us £5.99.
