Computerworld

Facebook users reported voting problems, but data use changes go ahead

Many Facebook users said they experienced problems when trying to vote on Facebook's changes to its governance processes.

Facebook has announced it is going ahead with the changes to its Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, despite some users having issues with the voting process.

After tallying votes on the changes, the social network said less than 1 per cent of more than 1 billion Facebook users voted on the changes, not meeting the condition that Facebook set out that more 30 per cent need to vote to make the results binding.

On December 10, <i>Computerworld.com</i> suggested that not enough Facebook users cared to vote despite extensive media coverage and uproar over the issue. However, that may not be the case.

Many Facebook users made comments on the social network’s Site Governance Page that they had experienced problems that prevented them from being able to vote or were not aware that there was an opportunity to vote.

During the voting period, many Facebook users commented that they had problems installing an app for them to be able to vote, received error messages after attempting to vote several times, they were directed to pages that were in a foreign language they couldn’t understand, etc.

Many Facebook users who commented on the update that the social network will go ahead with the changes strongly oppose to this and would like a re-vote.

One Facebook user wrote: “I would like to see this whole thing go up for another vote, this time have it announced more than once, and stop having voters install a useless app and 'log in with FB' when they already are.

"Those are 2 things that people always shy away from, because pages/sites that do those 2 things are usually going to put a virus/trojan/spybot on your computer. This is why not many people voted, not because people were apathetic to this issue.”

For those Facebook users who did vote, majority of them voted against the changes – 589,141 out of 668,872 voted ‘no’.

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