The Facebook Blog

On Saturday, we concluded the notice and comment process for our latest set of proposed changes to Facebook's governing documents. This was the fifth time we've previewed new policies and asked for feedback since we adopted this framework early last year. I'm pleased to report that during the latest week-long process, we received more than 4,000 comments from people around the world, including users, regulators, and online privacy advocates.

As we announced at the opening of the period, these latest proposed revisions to our Privacy Policy... and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR) were designed to make way for some exciting new products we're contemplating. Because not all of these products have been finalized and many aren't yet built at all, we'll be able to use your comments to help influence our product development.

In addition to taking your feedback into account as our product teams and engineers are designing and coding, we wanted to respond to some of the common comments.

For example, some of you commented, in connection with the proposed new Privacy Policy, that you'd like to be able to hide your Friends List. In fact, this is something that people already have the ability to do. We announced this feature back in December, and you can read more about it in our Help Center.

Others had questions about the sections in the SRR requiring people to provide accurate information and limiting them to one account. These are not new requirements. Facebook has always been based on a real-name culture, and we feel strongly that these policies provide greater accountability and a safer and more trusted environment across the site.

Still others asked to be opted-out of having their information shared with advertisers. This reflects a common misconception about advertising on Facebook. We don't share your information with advertisers unless you tell us to (e.g. to get a sample, hear more, or enter a contest). Any assertion to the contrary is false. Period. Instead, we enable advertisers to target anonymized demographics and attributes. That is, a company selling boats can target people between 40 and 50 years old who expressed an interest in boating. However, we never provide the advertiser any names or other information about the people who are shown, or even who click on, the ads.

We also received questions about the proposed new language in the Privacy Policy relating to our plans to work with some pre-approved partner websites to offer a personalized experience when you arrive at these sites. Based on your comments, we think it's important to clarify a couple of points, even though this program has not yet been launched or even finalized.

First, it's important to underscore that this will be a test with a handful of carefully selected partners to provide express personalization on their sites. These partners will be pre-selected, reviewed, and bound by contracts with Facebook – much like other partners we have worked with in other contexts to deliver unique and innovative experiences. For example, we're working with Yahoo! to integrate Facebook across their properties, AOL to integrate our chat with AIM, and we first partnered with CNN.com to make their broadcast of the Presidential Inauguration more social with the launch of the Facebook live stream application.

In addition, partners who participate in this test will be required to provide an easy and prominent method for you to opt out directly from their website and delete your data if you do opt out. There will also be new features on Facebook.com to help you control your experience when you visit these sites.

In sum, the core idea behind this test is to work with partners to enable them to present you with a better, more relevant, and tailored experience when you visit their sites. While we have not finalized these features or partnerships, we think this is an exciting opportunity to make surfing the web a smoother and more engaging experience for people who use Facebook.

We're committed to building products that advance what's possible for people who want more personalized and social experiences on the Web. We're equally committed to evolving our products and technologies in a way that respects the trust you have put into Facebook.

As always, thanks for participating in our open governance process and sharing your feedback with us. We expect the new documents to be live on the site in the coming days. Stay tuned for future updates by becoming a fan of the Facebook Site Governance Page.


Barry is a director on Facebook's communications and public policy team.

Nearly a year ago, we committed to an open and transparent system of governance for Facebook. Specifically, we now post all proposed changes to our governing documents before they go into effect and solicit feedback on these proposals from the people who use Facebook. Since we started this unique process—in fact, we think we're the only major online service that does this—we've gone through several successful rounds of changes, and your comments have been invaluable to the process.

All web services occasionally have to change their governing... documents to accommodate new products. They just may not tell you about these changes, much less give you advance notice. Today, we're giving you that notice and beginning the process of listening to your feedback.

We're proposing another set of revisions to our Privacy Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to make way for some exciting new products we're contemplating. Not all of these products have been finalized and many aren't yet built at all. However, we've definitely identified some interesting opportunities to improve the way you share and connect with the people and things in your life.

So, today, we explain some of these policy changes, and sometime soon—when we're done designing and coding—we'll have more product details to announce. It is important to note that, while we're still developing many aspects of these products, user control over privacy remains essential to our innovation process and we'll continue to develop new tools to help you control the things you share on Facebook.

As always, we encourage you to review the newest proposed changes in their entirety and provide your own thoughts on the Facebook Site Governance Page.

Here are some of the biggest updates, a few of which are simply clarifications or further explanations of things that already happen today:

On Nov. 5, we wrapped up a week-long notice and comment period for a proposed revision to our privacy policy. This was a continuation of our ongoing effort to run Facebook in an open and transparent way. The goals of the revised policy were to make it more accessible and easier to understand.

We've spent the last week reviewing each and every one of your comments. While a lot of people participated, the total number of people commenting did not reach the threshold of 7,000 that makes a vote necessary according to our Statement of Rights and... Responsibilities. Because of this — and the fact that many of the comments were positive — we've decided to adopt the revised policy. We'll be posting it in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish soon.

In the coming weeks and months, we plan to build on the progress we've already made in making the document more accessible by also adding definitions of key terms, screen shots of important pages and informational "learn more" videos. We think these visual resources will make it even easier to understand how privacy works on Facebook.

We received excellent feedback from many of you over the course of the week, and the number of fans for the Facebook Site Governance Page more than doubled. Overall, you supported the proposed changes. For example:

Today, we take the next step in opening our site governance to everyone who uses Facebook with our first user vote. Through an application developed by Wildfire Promotion Builder, you can now vote on which documents you want to serve as the foundation for governing the Facebook site.

You will have two options on the ballot, as shown below: 1) the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR), which incorporate feedback from users and experts received during the 30-day comment period, or 2) the current Terms of Use,... which were developed by Facebook and did not go through an outside comment period.




You can vote until 11:59 a.m. PDT on April 23, at which point the results will be reviewed by an independent auditor to ensure their accuracy. To vote, go here.

We encourage you to participate and make your voice heard. For this vote and any future one, the results will be binding if at least 30 percent of active Facebook users at the time that the vote was announced participate. An active user is someone who has logged in to the site in the past 30 days.

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.

If you want to receive updates about Facebook's site governance, you can connect with the newly created Facebook Site Governance Page. We have transitioned our previous groups for the Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to this Page. It includes the full text of all of our documents and responses to people's comments on them, translated into several languages. We plan to use this Page to notify people about future proposed changes and announce additional votes as they're required.

We encourage you to join us in the governance of Facebook and vote by 11:59 a.m. PDT on April 23.

The 30-day comment period for submitting feedback on Facebook's proposed governance documents has ended, but the opportunities to help shape the policies that will govern Facebook have only begun. Since announcing the new governance structure in February, we received more than 3,000 comments from the over 10,000 members who joined each of the groups dedicated to discussion about the proposed Facebook Principles and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR).

Thanks to the help of volunteer law students from the University of California... Hastings, the University of San Francisco and Santa Clara University, our legal team has been reading every last one of your submissions. The group administrators from the original protest against the changes to the Terms of Use, Julius Harper and Anne Kathrine Yojana Petterøe, have been distilling the feedback down to a list of key concerns. We've also asked for comments from various privacy, copyright and internet law experts as well as several photography trade groups from around the world.

On April 16, we'll be posting revised versions of the documents based on the feedback we've received. We'll also be sharing a written response to the main concerns people have expressed. This will explain in clear language why we did — or did not — make certain changes. This is similar to how U.S. federal agencies create regulations.

At the same time, we'll be asking people to vote on the new revised documents. Voting will begin on April 16 and end on April 23. It will be done through an application developed on Facebook Platform by Wildfire, and the vote tabulation will be audited by an independent auditor to ensure that the results are accurate.

We encourage you to participate in this vote on our new revised documents. If it is approved, all future changes to the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities will go through the same process of notice and comment. As specified in the SRR, we will hold a vote on any proposed change if at least 7,000 people submit comments and the vote will be advisory unless at least 30 percent of our "active users" (people who have logged into Facebook at least once in the previous 30 days) participate in the vote. If turnout is 30% or more, the results will be binding.

Your continued involvement in this process is crucial, and we want to thank everyone who has participated so far. We look forward to taking the next step towards a more democratic system of online governance.


Simon, an associate on the Public Policy team, hopes to see you and all of your friends at the Facebook voting booth.

We recently announced a new way to develop Facebook's governing structure. Since then, we've heard from many of you as we work to further develop the documents that will explain the relationship between Facebook and our users. We're now more than halfway through the comment period—the time when you can submit feedback on two proposed documents. The first is the Facebook Principles, which reflect the philosophy and values we aspire to, and the second is the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which will govern Facebook's relationships with... users and others who interact with us and replace the existing Terms of Use.

If you haven't had a chance to read the documents and comment yourself, we encourage you to do so now. The comment period will close at 12:01 a.m. PST on March 29. We want to govern our system in an open and transparent way, and your involvement in this process is crucial. You can find the Facebook Principles here and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities here in English and a number of other languages.

To date, each of the Town Hall groups has over 10,000 members, and we've received nearly 3,000 comments. The Facebook Legal team is busy reading through your feedback to identify common threads that we hope to address with a revised version of the documents that will then be put up for a vote.

We're excited about this new process and encouraged to see a participatory model of governance in other contexts. Just this week, New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine opened up his state budget proposal for comment by supporters of his Facebook Page, saying he's "interested in what people have to say and taking some time to answer their questions."

We look forward to seeing what you have to say and answering your questions and concerns in the next version of our documents, as well. Thanks for your constructive participation so far, and keep checking back for more updates on this process. We'll be sharing information about how voting will work in the coming weeks.


Simon Axten, an associate on the Public Policy team, is looking forward to your comments.