Facebook plays democracy and lets you vote on the new terms of service, after the debacle some time ago. A good move, but do you really have that much of a choice?
You will have two options on the ballot, as shown below: 1) the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR), which incorporate feedback from users and experts received during the 30-day comment period, or 2) the current Terms of Use, which were developed by Facebook and did not go through an outside comment period.
The vote is open until April 23, 11:59 am PDT. Read more in Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post and on Techmeme of course.
However, there’s more to this, as AllFacebook points out:
In order for the vote to stick, “at least 30 percent of active Facebook users” must vote. That means around 60 million people will have to vote in the next week. So what are the odds of 60 million users voting? Pretty low. The largest application on Facebook, LivingSocial, currently has over 21 million monthly active users and it took them one month to get to that point.
So will 60 million users vote? I doubt it, but I can in no way be sure, Facebook is a strange beast indeed. I truly hope they’ll reach the 30% barrier, because this is a lovely thought:
If these new documents are approved, all future changes to the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities will go through the same process of notice and comment, and may be put to a vote if enough people comment.
Will you vote?
Author: Thord Daniel Hedengren
Thord Daniel Hedengren is a designer, writer, and blogger, and also the former editor of The Blog Herald. He used to be a hotshot in the gaming industry in Sweden, but sold everything and went International. Most recently he wrote a book called Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog, and does loads of kickass design.
