Facebook Privacy Policy Changes No Longer Subject to User Input? New System Abolishes Vote

Facebook is attempting to amend the way users vote on changes to the privacy policy.

Under a new privacy policy Facebook wants to implement, users will no longer be able to shut down changes to the policy through sheer numbers.

Currently, policy changes are subject to a one-week comment period. If more than 7,000 users comment on a proposed change, the entire userbase can vote on the change. If more than 30 percent of users vote to oppose the change, it is scrapped.

Facebook says that policy worked fine in 2009 when it was originally implemented and Facebook had 200 million users. But now that over a billion people have Facebook accounts (one in seven people on the planet), getting 7,000 comments on any policy change is trivial.

This effect has become more severe in the wake of several campaigns to stop certain policy changes, which ask people to simply copy and paste a prewritten comment to trigger the vote protocol.

The current policy makes no distinction between the quality of comments, just their number.

Facebook also says the 30 percent opposed votes standard doesn't work any more, though it actually makes it easier for site admins to make the changes they want.

Thirty percent of the current userbase is 300 million votes. So even a very unpopular policy would need an astronomical number of votes to be canned. It's nearly impossible to get 300 million people to vote on any one thing.

To put it in perspective, that's about the number of people who vote in the finals for American Idol. It's almost twice the number who voted in this year's American presidential election.

And it's only going to grow as Facebook's userbase grows.

However, the changes Facebook wants implemented don't really give more power to the users. Instead, they simply want to remove the vote protocol. Users can still comment on changes, but no matter what they say or how many people speak up, there's nothing they can do to stop a change they don't like.

While Facebook's current policy is obviously broken, this seems like a poor compromise.