Facebook put the power in the hands of the people recently by allowing us to vote for changes we would like in their privacy policy. Even though a lot of people complain about the policy the people did not handle it properly. Details of what I am talking about after the jump.
Facebook closed the vote on its new data use policy and new statement of rights and responsibilities Friday, with a paltry 342,632 ballots cast as of a minute before closing. The vote needed 270 million participants to be binding, but falling far short of that benchmark, Facebook will use the vote tally in an advisory manner as it mulls a change over its new policies.
Facebook instituted the vote in response to lobbying against the new policies from Europe v. Facebook, a privacy activist group opposed to many of Facebook’s data use policies (for instance, a lack of transparency in what data Facebook collects, how long it keeps it, and who it shares the data with, and making certain types of collection opt-in rather than opt-out). The group pushed its followers to leave enough Facebook comments on the policy change announcement that, by Facebook’s own rules, the change was forced to a vote. Just shy of 300,000 users voted against the policy change, while around 45,000 voted for it.
Facebook made no material effort to make users aware of the vote beyond posting to its Site Governance page, which has been “liked” by over 2 million people who may have seen the posts appear in their News Feed. More curiously, Europe v. Facebook made few efforts to promote the vote either beyond logging updates on the tally; perhaps they knew that getting 270 million people to participate in anything, especially something as dry as a vote on a privacy policy change, would be a pipe dream. In a blog post about the vote, Europe V. Facebook called the vote a “farce” (PDF) and accused Facebook of having a “Chinese understanding of democracy.” Neither Facebook nor Europe v. Facebook responded immediately to requests for comment.
The way the vote played out feeds into skepticism about the seriousness with which Facebook approached the vote. While Facebook didn’t make its policy changes a secret, it scarcely tried to bring it to users’ attention. The company might have sought to use the vote to prove that few users really do care about privacy, that its loss is worth the exchange for Facebook’s services, or even that users approve of the language and data use changes in the new policy. By obscuring the vote, it only appeased privacy advocates in the most token way possible. Compare and contrast that with Google, which placed a link to its new privacy policy under the search box on its home page, for every user, for a few weeks before the policy went into effect. You can lead the slack-jawed Internet users to the privacy policy, but you can’t make them read. In Facebook’s case, there wasn’t even much leading.
