Facebook has ignored a vote "cast" by 297,883 of its members who agreed that the social network shouldn't update its data use policy, according to The Register.
Despite that, the company is amending its rules on the way it slurps data from its users for the purposes of advertising – a move that comes in the wake of the Irish data protection commissioner's privacy inspection of the website at the end of 2011.
That watchdog is the nearest responsible data protection authority outside of the firm's U.S. headquarters, where all the data Facebook collects is stored.
Facebookers triggered a vote on the company's proposed data use policy tweak, after those opposed to the plan pushed passed the 7,000 user comments threshold to force a public online debate on the changes.
But, as detailed in Facebook's "Statement of Rights and Responsibilities" (SRR), 30 per cent of the company's 900 million users would need to cast a vote to make the result binding, rather than advisory.
Last week, the company's communications and public policy veep Elliot Schrage said: “We strongly believe these updates provide you with more detail and transparency about our data protections and practices. We received a great deal of positive feedback about these changes from our regulators and the many other stakeholders – including privacy and consumer groups – we consulted about these revisions.”
He claimed that Facebook had undertaken a "substantial outreach effort" to inform its users about the planned changes to its policy. But he described the 297,833 people who voted against the proposal as an "unrepresentative percentage of our user community." He said a total of 342,632 people cast a vote on the site.
