Facebook’s Privacy Policy Changes: Like?

Facebook changed its privacy policy. What? You didn’t hear about it?

Turns out you weren’t alone. Facebook had a poll open last week in order for users to vote on updates to the social network’s privacy policy. Among the proposed changes were revisions to the site’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Data Use Policy. (What the vote should have proposed was ensuring an easy way to find these proposed changes and how to vote on them, but that’s another story) The information was posted under the Facebook and Privacy page, which has 814,000 likes. Seems like a big page…until you remember there are over 900 million Facebook users.

With such a large community, and the Internet’s penchant for being an attractor of everyone with an opinion, you’d think people had a lot to say about how Facebook is changing policies. You would also be wrong. Throughout the week that the polls were open, 342,632 votes were cast. This translates to .038% of Facebook users. To put that in perspective, Facebook wanted to have at least 30% of users vote to make the proposed changes binding. That’s 270 million users. Not even close.

Of these votes, 87% of them voted against the new policy changes. However, since the turnout was so low and a public vote isn’t necessary for policy changes, Facebook went ahead and adopted them. The public vote is more a matter of good faith. The network sought transparency in its actions, but it didn’t receive widespread acknowledgement. Why not?

Considering how easily we all scroll over Terms of Use agreements, and unless you live in an area where Facebook was blocked for a time, you probably didn’t even realize there was a privacy controversy. Sure, you may have seen people posting statuses that they want their information kept private, but these same people probably weren’t voting. Not because they don’t care, just that they didn’t know.

So what does this all mean? It shows that even the biggest Internet giants can’t always get widespread participation. Sure, signing up for Facebook is simple, but once you’re there, who cares? You’re already in! It also shows how Facebook advertising has the potential to fall flat. You may say that Facebook should be using its own advertising features more effectively in order to get users to pay attention. With an issue that affects all users as opposed to just those in a certain zip code, perhaps a series of promoted posts (or even just a notification after logging in) would have been beneficial. They did. We just didn’t notice.

Have we become so ingrained with online advertisements that they have essentially become invisible to us? What can we as marketers do to ensure our clients’ campaigns don’t have the same gaffe as Facebook? It’s a matter of content, imagery and time…and making sure your messaging stands out from all the other users attempting to do the same thing. Luckily, we’re here to help.

We’ll just have to stay vigilant with what’s going on in changes to the social sphere because, honestly, it’s really a matter of paying attention.

Written by Amy DiFrancesco

Amy has a strong love of vocabulary, punctuation and all things digital. She graduated from Mizzou with a degree in Convergence Journalism, specializing in Print Editing, and has minors in both English and French. She parlayed these studies into marketing, where she's been utilizing her words through new and social media, online content creation and the process of web strategy development for a wide range of industries. Amy hails from the shores of Erie and believes her Cleveland sports fandom helps build patience and strong moral character.

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