  Social networking services have attracted millions of users, including
individuals, professionals, and companies, that upload massive amounts of
content, such as text, pictures, and video, every day. Content creators retain
the intellectual property (IP) rights on the content they share with these
networks, however, very frequently they implicitly grant them, a sometimes,
overly broad license to use that content, which enables the services to use it
in possibly undesirable ways. For instance, Facebook claims a transferable,
sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license on all user-provided content.
Professional content creators, like photographers, are particularly affected.
In this paper we propose a design for decoupling user data from social
networking services without any loss of functionality for the users. Our design
suggests that user data are kept off the social networking service, in third
parties that enable the hosting of user-generated content under terms of
service and overall environment (e.g., a different location) that better suit
the user's needs and wishes. At the same time, indirection schemata are
seamlessly integrated in the social networking service, without any cooperation
from the server side necessary, so that users can transparently access the
off-site data just as they would if hosted in-site. We have implemented our
design as an extension for the Chrome Web browser, called Redirect2Own, and
show that it incurs negligible overhead on accessing 'redirected' content. We
offer the extension as free software and its code as an open-source project.
