by Elizabeth Kricfalusi, Tech for Luddites

In a post from last year, Setting Up Your Facebook Page, I explained how important it is to think up front about whether to set up your fan page attached to your personal profile or as a separate identity. I mentioned you could also set up a separate “personal” profile and, as an aside, said:

I should also point out that having two individual profiles is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service as well.

Last week, reader Andrew wrote to me asking where that information appeared in the Terms of Service because he couldn’t find it. And, sure enough, when I went back and looked myself, it no longer seems to be there. I was starting to wonder if maybe I’d imagined it in the first place, but when I did a search on their Help files (which never seem to get updated), I found this entry about Pages, which states:

Maintaining multiple accounts, regardless of the purpose, is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use. If you already have a personal account, then we cannot allow you to create business accounts for any reason. You can manage all the Pages and Socials Ads that you create on your personal account.

So that confirms it was once there. The current terms are dated December 21, 2009, but I suspect this change happened in November, when they released a new Statement of Rights and Responsibilities in response to a number of complaints from users, media reports, and an investigation by the Canadian government about privacy protection and ownership of content.

So it definitely appears that there’s no problem having multiple accounts now (I hesitate to say anything conclusively when it comes to Facebook…), which is good for people who don’t want to attach their fan pages to their personal accounts, but felt they had to “just in case.”

If anybody knows anything different regarding this, please let me know and I’ll update the post.

Thanks, Andrew, for bringing this to my attention!