Facebook Dropping Voting as Prerequisite to Privacy Changes

Facebook's last user vote has closed, once again with a minuscule turnout compared to the size of the social network in general according to its site governance page. Only 668,872 votes were cast out of the billion active users for a turnout of 0.067 percent. Facebook is now free to enact its new privacy policies without concern for the vote results. The new policy will, among other things, remove the user vote as a necessary step in policy changes.

Facebook instituted a rule that would push any policy changes that received more than 7,000 comments to a sitewide vote back in April 2009, nearly four years ago. The most recent version of the company's statement of rights and responsibilities as well as the data use policy remove the need for that step. It also frees Facebook from having to keep data stored in the US and Europe separate. Likewise, Facebook will no longer have to store its Instagram data separately.

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