Would you sign up with a Web site if during the sign up process you were warned that you had to give away all your rights to anything you publish on that site? Even the privacy unawarest should prick up their ears in such a case, but in case of CouchSurfing, there is no warning, just one inconspicious paragraph in the TOS (Terms of Service) that the majority of CouchSurfing users probably have never read:
You Grant Us a License. By submitting any content (including without limitation, your photograph) to our Site, you hereby grant us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, display, perform, adapt, modify, distribute, have distributed and promote such content in any form, in all media now known or hereinafter created and for any purpose.
Let's recapitulate a minute what the above means: Basically, anything you upload to that site, including your photos, profile entries and other text, and virtually anything else, may be used in any way by the provider of the service. Don't forget that any also means your private data such as an email address. Have you noticed how often the word "any" has appeared in this blog entry so far?
CouchSurfing.com claim to offer a new kind of traveling spirit under a "dot-org" charity umbrella, but back to reality, they also make big money and work under highly doubtable if not in-acceptable terms of service. Any company should give the protection of its users' data the highest priority possible. The absolute opposite with CouchSurfing. The "free spirit of traveling" fits the "free spirit of using users' data and content" very well, doesn't it? There are contenders such as GlobalFreeloaders and HospitalityClub that may lack a nice user interface and the same large user base right now. However, with these services you can be sure not to sign a contract that allows the provider to do whatever they want with your data.
Now, you might think, come on, it's CouchSurfing, they're cool and they won't do anything mean with my data. Even if that was true for now, what about the future? What if some interested company makes an unrefusable offer to take over the service? And how sure can you be that nothing happens with your data right now? Data privacy and copyright is not only about what happens right now, but also what could happen. People are already reporting about problems related to uploaded content.
Again, the provider is CouchSurfing International Inc. - a corporation, not a charity organization. Well, the latter is not completely true. CouchSurfing indeed is a non-profit organization, officially a charity, just that it is making profit. There is nothing wrong with that, but the terms of service don't fit into the picture of the world as painted by CouchSurfing. So what is this all about?
In their Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) CouchSurfing state that their mission was "to facilitate high quality experiences for people exploring the world and giving back to humanity". Quite cheesy for a company that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars. The statement may have been true in the very beginning when CouchSurfing started. But how can a company whose mission is to "give back to humanity" actually trample under foot its users' rights and informational self-determination this way? It's not about giving back, it's more about taking all the rights to any submitted content.
Throw a quarter Dollar out of a plane flying over the ocean and try to get the quarter back later. Impossible. Same with your data here. Once thrown in to the CouchSurfing ocean, you will have already granted them the license to... again, do anything with it. Forever. "Perpetually". They could sell it to a dating site. They could sell your photos to a comedy show that makes fun of them. Once you press the upload button, your rights and control stop right away. That is not exactly what you expect from a non-profit organization.
Again, there are alternatives such as HospitalityClub where real volunteers work to keep up the real original spirit of these portals. With full respect of privacy and content, and without making money at all. Yet again, there's nothing bad about making money with a Web community, but beware of terms of service like these.
When Facebook introduced similar paragraphs into their terms of service more than one year ago, there was a heavy discussion going on until Facebook modified the terms again to pretend that their intentions were good. Now it's 2010 and Facebook again demonstrates how they ignore their users' wish for privacy when it comes to the money they can earn with user data: They even intend to pass on your user data to other sites - without your prior consent!
But back to CouchSurfing - Facebook is another story and deserves a blog entry of its own, although they show how little interest sites like these have in their users in deed. Now CouchSurfing has always had this critical paragraph, and has never changed it at all, ignoring any critique. Shouldn't a service like CouchSurfing try to make its users feel as comfortable as possible instead of taking all of their rights on submitted content. Why would a site have Terms of Service like these, if there was no intention to use the data in the granted way? Or if you ask the other way round: Why not remove or modify the paragraph if the users' data is not intended to be used as granted by the TOS anyway?
That said, let's also have a look at CouchSurfing's separate privacy policy. Will this make anything better? No, not at all. Read the following and try to understand:
We partner with another party to provide specific services. When the user signs up for these services, we will share names, or other contact information that is necessary for the third party to provide these services. These parties are not allowed to use personally identifiable information except for the purpose of providing these services.
Being awake minded, you should have come up with at least one of the following questions: Another Party? Who's that ominous "other party"? So they share my contact data with third parties who provide "specific" services. But what are the specific services? Maybe email advertising? Maybe selling contact data? Is this privacy policy deliberately designed to be that vague?
By the way, CouchSurfing is not the only service with terms like these.
As far as the conclusion goes, I am not recommending you to not use the CouchSurfing site. I recommend not signing up at all, at least as long as these inacceptable terms are still in place, as for those who have already uploaded their pictures and text: You have already granted CouchSurfing all the rights to your data, irrevocably.
You could say it's ignorance, nescience or maliciousness, you name it. Either way, it's inacceptable and CouchSurfing should do something about it. If enough users complain, CouchSurfing will have to react. Maybe CouchSurfing can be brought back on the right track as well.
For now, I will continue using HospitalityClub until CouchSurfing changes their policy and starts to respect their members' privacy and data appropriately.