Very few people care about the changes to actually do something about it

Nov 22, 2012 15:48 GMT  ·  By

People don't care about Facebook privacy policy, they just like to act like they care. Every time Facebook changes something, for better or for worse, the hordes come out in large numbers and decry the changes, threatening to leave Facebook if they don't get their way.

Facebook ignores them and no one ever stops using the site, unless they're a Google employee around the time Google+ was supposed to be out.

But Facebook has to pretend to care about the people pretending to care about the policy issues.

Because, yes, people are all up in arms about the new policy changes which, while seemingly taking away some user powers, are the direct result of people not caring about those powers in the first place.

Several years ago, when Facebook was a wee baby and had only about 200 million users, it implemented a rule that said that any policy issue or attempted change that got more than 7,000 comments would be put to a public vote.

If the vote got more than 30 percent of Facebook's user base interested, the results of the vote would be binding. This rule hasn't actually been put to use that many times.

Now, Facebook wants to remove it altogether. It's this that has people "concerned" – the move, at face value, seems to be against the interest of users.

But the last time Facebook held a vote for the changes it planned to implement to its policies, this year in June, vote "turnout" was abysmal. While 7,000 comments were easy to reach, partly due to a large PR campaign by several groups, only 380,000 people voted.

Facebook had close to 1 billion active users at the time, and much more registered users, and needed some 300 million votes for it to count.

So now, Facebook wants to get rid of the vote rule and provide other ways for people to get involved, like the ability to address the site's Chief Privacy Officer, Erin Egan, directly. She would then respond to the issues that would gather the most comments.