Compete: Few Facebook Users Leave During Latest Terms of Service Concerns

March 6th, 2009

By Justin Smith

While there was certainly a lot of media coverage around Facebook’s decision to revert its terms of service a couple of weeks ago, few Facebook users decided to leave Facebook because of the concerns, according to data released by Compete.

While user visits to the Terms of Service document more than tripled in the week before Facebook announced its new Terms of Service governance process, account deactivations only rose slightly above their normal levels:

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While this is third party data (and thus pretty rough), it does generally show that relatively few Facebook users were so concerned by the events of the past few weeks that they decided to deactivate their accounts. After Facebook reverted its terms to the old version and announced the new site governance process, these metrics went back to normal.

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One Response to “Compete: Few Facebook Users Leave During Latest Terms of Service Concerns”

The Digital Social Contract « Musing Out Loud Says:
June 10th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
[...] Chastened, Facebook backed down and instead invited its users to help contribute and ratify a new Terms of Service as well as their Privacy Principles. Despite the furor, less than 3,000 Facebook users (.0015% of all FB users) contributed comments to the Terms of Service or the Privacy Principles and only 640,000 of 200 million Facebook users voted, or about 32% turned out. Of those that voted, three-fourths supported the new Terms of Service and Privacy Principles. And, in the ultimate test, very few left Facebook, according to Compete. [...]