Did You Vote on Facebook's Privacy Policy? Neither Did Anyone Else

After Europeans campaigned for Facebook to actually respect your personal boundaries, Facebook decided to put it to a vote. A vote they didn’t bother to mention on the homepage, or send you an email about, or include a link on the main page to.

Shockingly, as a result, less then one percent of Facebook users actually voted on the policy and Facebook will continue to do whatever it wants with the information you put on it constantly.

Only 342,632 people participated in the vote, which ran for a week and ended this morning, according to a blog post announcing the official results on the Facebook Site Governance page. That’s less than 1 percent — .038 percent to be exact — of the total 900 million active monthly Facebook users. The results would be binding only if 30 percent of all users, or 270 million, had voted.

The vote was triggered because a critical mass of people had commented on the proposed policies — seven times the amount needed, in fact. Opposition to the privacy policy revisions was mounted by an Austrian law student who waged a campaign via the “Europe versus Facebook” site to get people to post comments urging a vote. While there were enough people to prompt a vote, not enough people turned out to officially weigh in.

In other words, Facebook paid lip service to the idea of listening to its users to shut up some Europeans, and will continue to do whatever it wants. On the other hand, considering that it’s Europe that wants to make Facebook pay for fancy new broadband because, uh, it exists and people like it, we get why they don’t care that much.

(Image courtesy Sean MacEntee on Flickr)

 

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