Facebook has finally put its much talked-about privacy policy to vote. ,
Max Schrems, the Austrian founder of EUROPE Vs FACEBOOK, has forced Facebook to put proposed policy changes up for a vote by all of its users. Schrems mobilized his privacy group and flooded Facebook's Site Governance page with messages. The proposal received more than 7,000 comments, prompting Facebook to put the privacy policy to a vote.
However, this is not the first time that Facebook has asked its users to vote on changes in privacy policies. First time was in 2009 when Facebook was a much smaller company with near about 200 million users. This time 30 percent or 270 million out of the 900-odd million users will get to vote- for or against the proposal.
The three biggest changes as per Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan are :
Ø A clarification regarding Facebook's existing policy that it may use your data to serve you ads outside of Facebook.com while you're on other websites.
Ø A detailed new chart of how Facebook uses cookies to improve Facebook but not track you across the web.
Ø A more detailed explanation of how in some cases Facebook will "retain [your] data as long as necessary to provide you services" whether that's less or more time.
What Facebook wants is to make it simple for users to understand how their data is used. The most interesting change is the clarificationthat Facebook may show you standard ads while you're off-site, not just ads with social context as the policy already stated.
This is something different because Facebook does not show any ads offsite till now, other than helping to run ads on Zynga's standalone properties. Many have comprehended that Facebook will eventually launch an offsite ad network that could be embedded on any other site to show ads targeted with Facebook data to Facebook-logged in users who visit.
Facebook has never publicly admitted to this plan, but the Data Use Policy changes give it more freedom to launch an off-site ad network.
So, a user should be totally comfortable while surfing the site and should not be nebulous about the privacy policies. This initiative by Facebook is again an inspiration to giant organizations to be more transparent regarding their privacy policies to their users or customers.
