Facebook Forced By Privacy Activist

by Steve Dent

Max Schrems, the Austrian founder of Europe Vs. Facebook, has forced Facebook to put proposed policy changes up for a vote by all its users. By mobilizing his privacy group to flood Facebook’s Site Governance page with pasted messages, many more than 7,000 comments were received on the proposal — the threshold for triggering a vote. Europe Vs. Facebook is demanding sweeping changes to Facebook’s product rather than the small policy changes found in the proposal

Last Friday the one-week voting period opens on a set of a relatively benign changes and Facebook will notify users by web and mobile. If over 30% of Facebook’s active users, or 230 million people, vote for the changes they’ll go into effect, and if they vote against they’ll be scrapped. Otherwise Facebook will take the changes “under advisory”. Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer for Policy Erin Egan told me yesterday the company will consider changing its site governance voting system to discourage votes being triggered by low-quality comments and adapt to the growing size of Facebook’s user base.

Users can check out the proposed changes to Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and its Data Use Policy, and an explanation of the changes, then vote until 9am PST on June 8th.

Learn more at  tech crunch