After the web & twitter went crazy with the news that Facebook has changed their Terms of Use & now they have the policy which says “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.“, Facebook issued a clarification in it’s blog. The clarification is posted by Mark Zuckerberg.

Before the clarification was issued, many Facebook users, who also are on twitter, felt cheated and wanted to close the account on Facebook .

Here are the excerpts of the clarification issued by Facebook:

A couple of weeks ago, we updated our terms of use to clarify a few points for our users. A number of people have raised questions about our changes, so I’d like to address those here. I’ll also take the opportunity to explain how we think about people’s information.

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created-one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work.

People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time.