With lots of personal information on over 1 billion users, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) must be extremely careful whenever it makes changes. Of course, one of the social network’s hottest buttons is privacy.
In the latest move, Facebook is looking to drop its voting system that allows users to approve changes to the terms of service. This has been in effect since 2009.
It seems that democracy in the electronic world can be a tough thing. Facebook found that the voting system gave too much emphasis to “the quantity of comments over their quality.”
Well, many folks think this is a cop out. The Center for Digital Democracy and the Electronic Privacy Information Center have sent a letter of protest to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It says he’s clearly violating users’ privacy rights and this may actually be illegal. The letter also raises concerns about how Facebook plans to combine the data from its core social network with Instagram.
Despite all this, it looks like users really don’t care much about the voting system. During the summer, only 342,632 of them cast a vote. This is down from 665,654 in 2009, when the user base was just 200 million.
Tom Taulli runs the InvestorPlace blog IPO Playbook, a site dedicated to the hottest news and rumors about initial public offerings. He is also the author of “How to Create the Next Facebook” and “High-Profit IPO Strategies: Finding Breakout IPOs for Investors and Traders.” Follow him on Twitter at @ttaulli. As of this writing, he did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
A long-time follower of the IPO scene, back in 1999 Tom started one of the first sites in the space called WebIPO. It was a place where investors got research as well as access to deals for the dot-com boom. Tom also wrote the top-selling book, Investing in IPOs. In it, he covers all the aspects of analyzing an IPO, such as reading the prospectus, detecting the risk factors and understanding some of the arcane regulations. But don’t worry — if that process is too intimidating for you, thankfully Tom will do the legwork for you right here in the IPO Playbook blog.
Comments are currently unavailable. Please check back soon.