Facebook Privacy Vote

Image Credit : Facebook.com

It’s not often that a social media site asks it’s users opinions about privacy settings. What many people don’t know about Facebook is that the sites governance and policy allows users to vote on major changes. Well, users did have voting rights on facebook but those are set to disappear. Thanks to poor turn out to, you guessed it, vote.  This vote to protect voting opened last week and is set to close tomorrow at noon. Perhaps this was done intentionally as users lose the ability to vote on site governance if fewer than 300 million people vote.

So what exactly is at stake here?

According to Tech Crunch the vote covers changes to data sharing with affiliates (such as Instagram), who can send users messages, in addition to the changes of site governance.  The largest change is that user voting will no longer directly effect the site. While Facebook was far from a democracy, the sites experiment on user influence in social networking was groundbreaking. Facebook hopes to continue to listen to the needs of  it’s users after the vote. However, users will have lost any direct way of changing site policy.

The current number of votes stands at just over 600,000. The needed 30% or three million appears to be an unreachable goal. Voting ends tomorrow at noon. Will you be casting your vote?

 Vote here!

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