Facebook opens polls for TOS rewrite

Facebook, honoring its commitment to give users more input on the site's Terms of Service agreement, today opened opened the pools for users to cast a vote between the current TOS or a new one created with the help of user input.

Votes can be cast between now and 11:59 a.m. PDT on April 23. The results of the vote will be binding there's participation by at least 30 percent of active Facebook users (those have logged in during the past 30 days) at the time that the vote was announced. In a blog post, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made one important note:

If these new documents are approved, all future changes to the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities will go through the same process of notice and comment, and may be put to a vote if enough people comment. Even if these new proposed documents are defeated, we will still find ways to involve you in the governance process; however, this involvement will need to be explicitly stated in a future version of the Terms of Use.

Faecbook users cried foul earlier this year when they discovered that two sentences were taken out of the company’s Terms of Services agreement, sentences that allowed users to delete all of their uploaded content - pics, videos, notes and so on - and walk away from the service with only “archived copies” left behind for Facebook. Instead, the company tweaked the language - without notifying users - to allow Facebook to continue to stream, publish, copy, store, distribute and even sublicense user content for promotional purposes after the user quites.

Users revolted and the company reverted back to the old terms, vowing to open the process and allow users to chime in on the new terms.

Previous coverage: Facebook's TOS debacle: Be upset for a better reason