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Facing a federal complaint from a leading privacy advocacy organization and a revolt of tens of thousands of its users, Facebook on Tuesday night backed down from what many have seen as an onerous privacy policy.

Facebook informed all its users that it has, temporarily at least, reverted its terms of service to the previous version.

(Credit: Screenshot by CNET Networks)

The policy had seemed to grant Facebook perpetual rights to users' uploaded content, and the threatened complaint from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) had demanded, essentially, that the social-networking service return to its previous terms.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post late Tuesday that the company had decided to do just that:

Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input.

Going forward, we've decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don't plan to leave it there for long.

Zuckerberg also said that the company would be adopting a new set of terms that would more carefully take users' rights into consideration:

More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren't just a document that protect our rights; it's the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world. Given its importance, we need to make sure the terms reflect the principles and values of the people using the service.

Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we'll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms.

The move came after Facebook had, earlier in the day, polled its users as to whether it should revert to its previous terms. And in his blog, Zuckerberg said that the company would be asking users to get involved in crafting the next set of terms.

"If you'd like to get involved in crafting our new terms," Zuckerberg wrote, "you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we've created--Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I'm looking forward to reading your input."

Certainly, we'll have more on this as it develops.

But in the meantime, as blogger Leo Laporte put it on Twitter this evening, "Put down the pitchforks and call off the rabble."

A leading privacy advocacy group is preparing to file a federal complaint against Facebook's new privacy policies, a published report said Tuesday.

According to PC World, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is getting ready to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, demanding that the massively popular social networking service return to its previous policies.

It appears that the major thrust of EPIC's--and many others' anger--at Facebook stems from new language in the privacy policy that grants the company seemingly perpetual control over content users post there:

"You hereby grant Facebook 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 the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings....

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

There are currently more than 46,000 members of a Facebook group set up to protest the new policies.

In a blog post defending the new language, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that it wasn't as onerous as people were claiming, and that:

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. Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment.

But, wrote PC World, other online services, like MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, all have less strict controls over users' content.