Facebook TOS Voting Concludes, Users Vote for New Revised Documents
Facebook’s first-ever user vote on proposed changes to the site’s Terms of Service has just concluded, and the results are in: the new documents have won out over the old documents by a 74% – 26% margin.
More than 650,000 people voted during the last week – far short of the 60 million votes Facebook said would be required to make the vote’s results “binding.” Nevertheless, Facebook is likely to adopt the new governing documents, since it has invested so much time, energy, and PR effort in its process of revising them with input from privacy advocates and concerned users.
Although Facebook promoted the TOS vote on every user’s home page, less than 1% of users who saw the notice participated. It just goes to show that while a few users clearly got upset over TOS issues, most just don’t care enough (or aren’t familiar enough with the issues to care, privacy advocates would say) for now.
Given the number of people who are growing up on Facebook – as well as the influx of users over 35 onto Facebook, especially in recent months – we expect there to be continued concerns about online rights and online privacy on Facebook in the years ahead, particularly as those concerns relate to the ways Facebook allows users to control access to personal information. The number of ways that personal information being shared by people on Facebook could theoretically be misused at some point are endless.
However, Facebook has done an unprecedented job at building and establishing trust with its users, who continue to share more and more information on the site in droves. As long as Facebook continues to prove itself a good steward of that trust and data, users will be happy with the service and increasingly trust it with more of their personal information.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Sorry, but while I’m one of those who “got upset over TOS issues,” I don’t think a long-enough window was allowed for the voting.
We’re all busy, and this economy, I’m working harder than ever to prove my worth at work. I just didn’t take the time to read through legalese, make sense of it, and cast an informed vote.
I don’t recall noticing a deadline on this, either.
April 23rd, 2009 at 11:20 pm
[...] needed in the Terms of Service pseudo-democracy stunt. Because they did, and both AllFacebook and Inside Facebook confirms it. So how many people did in fact [...]
April 24th, 2009 at 7:14 am
[...] Although he noted for future elections the company will consider reducing the vote threshold. As others have mentioned, Facebook really had no choice to tweak the “voting rules” to make it count; given that [...]
April 24th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
[...] Facebook TOS Voting Concludes, Users Vote for New Revised Documents (insidefacebook.com) [...]
April 26th, 2009 at 1:21 am
[...] Facebook TOS Voting Concludes, Users Vote for New Revised Documents [...]
April 26th, 2009 at 1:22 am
[...] Facebook TOS Voting Concludes, Users Vote for New Revised Documents [...]
April 27th, 2009 at 2:23 am
[...] needed in the Terms of Service pseudo-democracy stunt. Because they did, and both AllFacebook and Inside Facebook confirms it. So how many people did in fact [...]
June 4th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
[...] a echarse atrás en estas modificaciones e inclusive a llevar a cabo un proceso democrático de votación para que los usuarios se pronuncien acerca de las modificaciones que se iban a producir. Esto nos [...]
August 19th, 2009 at 6:32 am
[...] pesar de que Facebook anunció la votación de los TOS en la página inicial de todos los usuarios, menos del 1% que lo vio, participó. Nos reservamos el derecho de cambiar nuestra Política de privacidad y nuestras Condiciones de uso [...]
September 16th, 2009 at 10:34 am
[...] to mean Facebook wanted new rights to user data. The company responded to criticism by introducing a multi-stage process where users could provide feedback on the terms before they were [...]