The final user vote over proposed privacy changes on Facebook, which dealt with whether users would continue to vote on privacy changes on Facebook, has come to an end.
The vote ended yesterday and failed to gather the 30% of Facebook’s users the company required for a vote to become binding for Facebook. 300 million people would have had to participate in the vote but, in the end, only 668,872 users ended up voting on whether they would be allowed to give input on the company’s privacy policy.
Of those, 589,141 were opposed to the proposed changes and 79,731 voted for them. The number of people who voted only totals about 0.07% of Facebook’s user base so Facebook will now be able to set its own policy regarding privacy changes without feedback from the community.
Gabriel Consulting Group analyst Dan Olds commented on the outcome of the vote, saying “So they only got .07 percent of the total 1 billion user base to participate in the election. The vast majority of users don’t think about this stuff much. The ones you hear from are a very tiny, but vocal, minority.”
He went on to say “They’re so big now that every change they make will be scrutinized by major media outlets, business publications, blogs, and of course, users, too. Their moves will get even more attention, both good and bad. So they’re still going to be accountable for what they do privacy-wise; it just won’t be by a formal user vote.”
Source: PC World
