Facebook voters reject privacy changes but fail to meet threshold

SAN FRANCISCO: -- Facebook is free to implement controversial changes to its privacy policies after online voters failed to meet the threshold Monday needed to make their rejection of the proposal binding on the social networking company.

Facebook had asked its approximately 1 billion members on December 3 to vote on ending a 2009 policy that made changes to privacy guidelines subject to user approval.

Facebook wanted to loosen restrictions on who can message you on Facebook and to share information with its affiliates, including popular photo-sharing service Instagram.

The vote was the largest in Facebook’s history with 589,141 people rejecting the changes and only 79,731 supporting them. However, the number of voters fell far short of the 30 per cent of Facebook members needed to make the vote binding.

The vote was scheduled after Facebook’s proposed changes to the site’s governance were attacked by privacy groups, including Electronic Privacy Information Centre and the Centre for Digital Democracy.

-- The Nation 2012-12-11

Not a problem for me; if it becomes too intrusive despite setting my privacy settings to friends only, I shall just close my account. I've done it before and blocked e-mails from Facebook to stop all the 'don't you miss A N Other?' messages.

Only rejoined to see pictures of my grandson in UK but get them sent direct if needed.

they set the bar a bit high there didnt they with the number of voters required?! they required 300 million to vote before they would consider it a valid vote...!! and just over 1/2 a million did

yet about 90% of those who voted were opposing

why do facebook think 30%, of what are possibly mainly light users of facebook, would show interest in this?

why do facebook think 30%, of what are possibly mainly light users of facebook, would show interest in this?

Well obviously facebook set the bar high so that they could reject the rejection of those who did vote.

Agreed. I voted against, but I'm a reasonably heavy user due to my work. Most of my aquaintences are very light users, once per week or less, who probably didn't even see the notice and wouldn't pay attention to it if they did.

FB needs it's rules as loose as possible to increase the advertising options. That's where the money is after all. Well, there and in Zynga...