Facebook Privacy Policy Vote Fail | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Privacy Policy Vote Fail

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34 pointssparknlaunch23 comments

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.

I'd prefer an email to a flashy banner. I only log into facebook once a month or so, but I'd certainly have shown up there for a vote if I'd heard about this before it was too late.

It's difficult to think of anything that could make 30% of users take some action. Most radical I can think of is not allowing access to your account before a vote has been cast.

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

Ditto.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> Facebook is turning out to be an unethical company.

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

"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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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