imbee.com
3 min read
On a listserv in which I participate, a member recently asked about safe blogging tools for students. I was surprised to see several people recommend imbee.com, a social networking service targeted at kids. This was my response to the list:
imbee's terms of service rule it out as a tool I would recommend to anyone.
"You understand and agree that you have no ownership rights in your imbee.com account. imbee may cancel your account and delete all content associated with your account at any time, and without notice, if we deem that you have violated the terms of this agreement, or for any other reason."
So, as a teacher using this site, you should probably be aware that your data is there entirely at the discretion of imbee.com. It's the technological equivalent of couch-surfing to avoid paying rent. It's a great deal, until the person who owns the couch tells you it's time to leave. Imbee says as much later in the document.
"imbee does not claim ownership of content you create, upload, transmit or make available in any way on imbee. By posting content on imbee you grant imbee a non-exclusive, fully-paid, royalty-free worldwide license to copy, use, translate, modify, adapt, store, and reproduce the content for the purposes of displaying, publishing, distributing, and transmitting the content on imbee and affiliated sites. If you remove content from imbee, this license will be terminated. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you understand and acknowledge that imbee.com owns the servers on which your content resides, and you own no protectable rights in and to those servers, your user account, or any data imbee stores on its servers."
This is probably my favorite section, for both the torturous logic and the blatant disrespect imbee's legal team shows for the rights of its users. Basically, imbee is saying that it doesn't own your content, but that it has the rights to do whatever it wants with your content on any "affiliated" site. And, given that imbee is owned by Industrious Kid, and that Industrious Kid is bankrolled by Disney -- (see here ) -- the circle of affiliated sites is potentially pretty large. In the final part of this section, imbee creates the "server as couch" connection, effectively saying that you have no real rights to anything you create that is stored on or made possible by imbee.com's hardware/software.
imbee's privacy policy at () is about what one would expect. To quote: "In order to develop and provide certain products or services, we may share your information with third party vendors, contractors, or business partners." These terms allow imbee to share your personal information with whoever they want without your knowledge or consent. But hey, that shouldn't bother you, because by using imbee you have already conceded that you don't own this information anyways. imbee does, by virtue of it being stored on their server.
In conclusion, use an open source option. With open source tools, you control your data. You control your work. Your students are not being entered in a marketing scheme for [fill in company name here].
