Users Approve Facebook Policy Face-Lift
Facebook has decided to move forward with the implementation of new policies based on the results of a week-long vote by users that ended Thursday evening.
During the past week, users of the social-networking service were given the opportunity to vote for the policy documents they think should serve as the foundation for governing the site, noted Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s general counsel.
“The preliminary numbers indicate that approximately 74.4 percent of users who voted chose the proposed documents — the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities — over the existing terms of use,” Ullyot said. “More than 600,000 users participated in the vote.”
A Perfect Storm
Many Facebook users were outraged in mid-February when the social-networking site unilaterally changed its terms of service in a way that granted Facebook an irrevocable worldwide license to use, retain, modify and distribute their content as well as use their names, likenesses and images for any purpose. Under Facebook’s previous terms of service, users had retained full ownership over all their content and could remove it from the site at any time.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerman initially tried to head off what amounted to a perfect storm by saying the site’s philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with.
“When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with,” Zuckerman said. “Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.”
But Zuckerman’s comments did not fly with blogs such as The Consumerist, which noted that anything users uploaded to Facebook under the policy introduced in February could be used by the social-networking site “in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what…
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