by Elliot Schrage, Vice President, Communications, Public Policy and Marketing
Since announcing proposed updates to both our Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, we’ve heard from many of you through our comment process. We are grateful that you took the time to share your thoughts. This feedback allows us to respond to your questions and make substantive changes to our proposals before they are implemented.
Our teams at Facebook Inc. and Facebook Ireland Ltd. (which together operate the Facebook service worldwide) have now read and considered your comments.
Based on your feedback and after consultation with our regulators, including the Irish Data Protection Commissioner’s Office, we’ve further clarified some of our proposals. We are posting a revised version of the Data Use Policy that includes those new proposed changes.
Most of your comments related to the changes we proposed to our site governance process, which we respond to in more detail here. But you had questions about other proposals as well. For example, you asked us to clarify proposed language in our Data Use Policy explaining that we will share information with our corporate affiliates. This provision is standard in the industry and promotes the efficient and effective use of the services Facebook and its affiliates provide – for example, permitting information to be shared with our affiliates allows our users in the United States (whose services are provided by Facebook Inc.) to interact with our users in Europe (whose services are provided by Facebook Ireland Ltd.). We’ve revised this proposal to make it clear that the sharing of information among our affiliates is and will be done in compliance with all applicable laws, and where additional consent of our users is required, we will obtain it. You can learn more about this proposed change and others you asked about in our explanation of changes here.
What’s Next?
Today we are also announcing the next step in our site governance process – a vote on our proposed changes to both documents, including our additional clarifications to the Data Use Policy. Voting will be facilitated by an application developed on Facebook Platform by a third-party service provider. An independent auditor will examine the vote tabulation to further ensure accurate results.
We encourage you to participate in the vote on our new revised documents by using this link. Voting will end on December 10 at 12:00PM (PST) / December 10 at 8:00PM (GMT). As stated in both policies, if more than 30% of all active registered users vote, the results will be binding. If turnout is less than 30%, the vote will be advisory.
We also hope you will join representatives from Facebook Inc. and Facebook Ireland Ltd. on December 4 at 9:30AM (PST)/December 4 at 5:30PM (GMT) for a live webcast where we’ll answer more of your questions. You can use this link to watch and ask a question by clicking the “Talk to Us” button.
Thanks again for your feedback and participation in this important process, which continues to be an essential part of Facebook’s commitment to being transparent and accountable.