Whopping .038% of Facebook users vote on data use policy change
Posted in: Legal, Privacy & Security at 10/06/2012 15:15
Facebook closed the vote on its new data use policy and new statement of rights and responsibilities Friday, with a paltry 342,632 ballots cast as of a minute before closing. The vote needed 270 million participants to be binding, but falling far short of that benchmark, Facebook will use the vote tally in an advisory manner as it mulls a change over its new policies.
Facebook instituted the vote in response to lobbying against the new policies from Europe v. Facebook, a privacy activist group opposed to many of Facebook's data use policies (for instance, a lack of transparency in what data Facebook collects, how long it keeps it, and who it shares the data with, and making certain types of collection opt-in rather than opt-out). The group pushed its followers to leave enough Facebook comments on the policy change announcement that, by Facebook's own rules, the change was forced to a vote. Just shy of 300,000 users voted against the policy change, while around 45,000 voted for it.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/whopping-00038-of-facebook-users-vote-on-data-use-policy-change/
