Facebook may scrap your right to vote on privacy changes

Cites difficulty in getting 30% of its billion-plus users to pass a change

Social networking site Facebook which gives utmost importance to its users’ feedback on its governance process has now proposed taking away users' ability to vote on changes pertaining to its future privacy policy.

According to the present policy, if a proposed change receives 7,000 comments, all its users can vote on the changes. If the proposed change receives votes of more than 30 per cent of Facebook’s active registered users, the results become ‘binding’ on the company.

However, in a blog post on Wednesday, Facebook has said that the current system has become outdated since getting 300 million active users to vote on a certain policy change is not easy now given the fact that the site has over one billion users now.

“We deeply value the feedback we receive from you during our comment period. In the past, your substantive feedback has led to changes to the proposals we made. However, we found that the voting mechanism, which is triggered by a specific number of comments, actually resulted in a system that incentivised the quantity of comments over their quality,” Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s Vice President of Communication, Public Policy and Marketing wrote in an official blog post.

“Therefore, we're proposing to end the voting component of the process in favor of a system that leads to more meaningful feedback and engagement,” the post added.

The company has now proposed a system where the changes would rely solely on the users comments received during the review and comment period. It has also proposed introducing an 'Ask the Chief Privacy Officer’ feature which will enable the users to send questions about privacy directly its chief privacy officer.

Facebook has invited its users to read the proposed changes on its Site Governance Page and comment on those. Once the comment period is over on November 28, 2012, Facebook will host a live event where the company’s Chief Privacy Officer of Policy, Erin Egan will respond to the comments.