Facebook to let users vote on privacy changes

BARBARA ORTUTAY

AP Tech­nol­ogy Writer

NEW YORK — Face­book is let­ting its nearly 1 bil­lion users vote on changes to its pri­vacy policy.

The pre­vi­ously announced changes include new sec­tions explain­ing how it uses people’s infor­ma­tion. The updates also reflect recently added fea­tures such as a new pro­file for­mat called Timeline.

The new pol­icy also opens up the pos­si­bil­ity for Face­book to start show­ing peo­ple ads on out­side web­sites, tar­get­ing the pitches to inter­ests and hob­bies that users express on Facebook.

The vot­ing period starts Fri­day and runs through next week. The com­pany had announced the changes in May, a week before its ini­tial pub­lic offer­ing of stock. Facebook’s highly antic­i­pated IPO landed with a thud, clos­ing just 23 cents above its $38 offer­ing price on its first trad­ing day. The stock has declined another 26 per­cent in the two weeks since then.

This is the sec­ond time Face­book Inc. is let­ting users vote on pol­icy changes. The first time was in 2009 when Face­book was a much smaller, pri­vately held com­pany with fewer than 200 mil­lion users.

It may be the last time, though.

Thirty per­cent of Facebook’s 900 mil­lion users, or 270 mil­lion peo­ple, have to vote on the changes — for or against — to have the process be bind­ing. Oth­er­wise, Face­book con­sid­ers the vote “advisory.”

That will most likely be the case. Facebook’s exper­i­ment in democ­racy hasn’t panned out as expected. While thou­sands of peo­ple have left com­ments on Facebook’s pro­posed changes, “our orig­i­nal intent was to get high-quality,” and not high-quantity com­ments, said Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief pri­vacy offi­cer of policy.

Face­book said it is still inter­ested in get­ting user feed­back on its poli­cies, but it is review­ing how best to do so.

“While our par­tic­i­pa­tory mech­a­nisms may change, our com­mit­ment to greater trans­parency, account­abil­ity and respon­sive­ness will not,” Face­book vice pres­i­dent Elliot Schrage wrote in a blog post. “We will explore ways to bring user sug­ges­tions and con­cerns before Facebook’s management.”

Posted by AP News on Jun 1 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.