

Facebook Privacy Policy Vote Fail - sparknlaunch
http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1112551484/lack-of-participation-makes-facebook-privacy-policy-vote-non-binding/

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kitsune_
What a load of horse shit. Who has actually heard of this vote taking place?
If you require 30% of your user base to participate, for it to have a binding
verdict, you better market this with a flashy banner on the top of every page.

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Deestan
I pop into Facebook daily, and have not noticed anything.

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pbhjpbhj
Ditto.

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nikcub
This wasn't promoted well enough. I consider myself a bit of a Facebook
privacy advocate and would have liked to have helped promote this, but I
hadn't even heard of it until the vote was over.

It seems to be getting a lot more coverage as a failure than it did as an
idea.

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ErrantX
The "vote" was mostly a load of crap. But I do have one issue:

 _is if they had liked the Site Governance page and therefore seen updates
from that page; if one of their friends voted and clicked a box to send an
update to their profile’s news feed; or if they happened to notice a promo for
the vote that was mixed in with the ads on the right side of the page… I never
saw a promo, but that’s because I ignore the small ads and other items on the
far right. I suspect most people do._

I was notified via a massive box at the top of my news feed - one that spanned
the whole feed and had a big call to action.

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majani
Facebook need to get real with that voter requirement. Asking 270million to
come out and vote would require them to be rallied through a presidential-
level campaign with TV ads, fund-raising dinners and all. I think 5-10 million
or thereabouts would be a more reasonable number, considering the biggest
pages in the world are slightly above that.

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sparknlaunch
If the vote actually meant something to Facebook, they would have asked every
active user at login to vote?

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setrofim_
Yup. This looks like it was just a PR stunt. An attempt to show the users that
FB are "listening" to them. And if that's the case, then it seems to have
backfired.

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luchs
Here in Germany, the voting was announced in the TV news (I remember seeing it
in the 'heute journal' and 'Tagesschau').

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farnsworth
There was a vote? I've never heard of this issue and I consider myself
somewhat well informed in tech current events.

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gyardley
Of course Facebook didn't promote this properly. It's not in Facebook's
interest to promote this properly.

Those of you who care about this sort of thing should be asking yourselves why
the Facebook privacy advocates didn't or couldn't promote this properly on
their own - after all, the sharing mechanisms built into Facebook work pretty
well. That's the far more interesting question here.

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polshaw
Because as a user you can only share with your friends, because 270m people is
an impossibly large number and it would feel not even worth trying, because
people don't like to be spammed repeatedly, because fb has an authority (on
fb) that regular users don't have, because only a fraction of users read blogs
(etc) that might have promoted this, because apathy, because even if the
userbase achieved this impossible feat there would be nothing to stop fb from
just ignoring it.

Enough? Perhaps it should have been better publicised beforehand, but
ultimately it would have been futile anyway.

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gyardley
Of course Facebook can ignore the result / set impossibly high hurdles. It's
Facebook, not a democracy. I'm boggled that they bothered with this thing in
the first place.

We all agree that 270mm people is impossible, but many other things manage to
rack up low numbers of millions of users on Facebook, just from users sharing
with their friends. Why couldn't this one put together, say, a million? Unless
there's something I'm missing, three hundred thousand implies the public
wasn't buying what was being sold.

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nathan_long
Based on past experience with Facebook privacy policies, I have developed my
own, very effective one: _I do not give Facbook my data_.

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arihant
So they didn't advertise it well, and now they are planning to implement the
new regulations because of lack of participation?

Facebook is turning out to be an unethical company. This is really
unacceptable behavior from a company I rely for social connections and
sensitive information, including my private messages and contacts.

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bornhuetter
> Facebook is turning out to be an unethical company.

Turning out to be? They've never not been unethical.

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theorique
"Liked the Site Governance page?"

Sounds like about as big a thrill as C-Span, and with equal level of appeal.

However, I'm sure all 5 people who clicked "Like" on the Site Governance page
also voted.

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Vivtek
30% of 900 million users, 600 million of which are spam accounts? What a
conveniently impossible number of votes to obtain.

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pbhjpbhj
How do you come by this figure?

They could go for 30% of the number of users that have interacted with another
user in the last week. Yes, that number would include some spam activity.

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user49598
Saying facebook has 900 million users is like saying no one on earth ever
dies. If we required 30% of every one who ever live to vote, we'd never get
anything done.

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its_so_on
For what it's worth, when I heard about the vote, I saw that the voter turnout
requirement was absurd (for an online vote on a single service like this) - so
it was obviously a fake 'vote' Facebook didn't really want to happen. Just PR
so they can say, "Well, regarding the privacy policy we did actually put it to
a user vote."

This is the exact result it looked to me like they wanted.

