Facebook gets democratic – encourages voting on terms of service
Following last week’s kerfuffle involving Facebook, its terms of service update and the subsequent rolling back of said update, the site’s been very careful about how it communicates with the public. On CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s blog today, he’s announced a new approach to how the site is run.
First of all he’s published two documents. There’s a set of Facebook Principles, and a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, the latter of which will replace the existing terms of service document. However, they’re not in force yet.
Zuckerberg wants you, if you’re a Facebook user, to go through and read both documents and comment on the changes. Any controversial sections will go up for a vote. It’s an interesting approach for the site, which has been stung by criticism in the past for not listening to its users.
Hopefully the community can come to some kind of agreement with the site’s lawyers, and a compromise can be found. The worst case scenario here is that no agreement gets reached, and the site is stuck with its existing ToS. That wouldn’t be good for anyone.
