Facebook invites privacy feedback after policy updates

Facebook has re-opened feedback for its contentious Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, asking users who expressed a particular interest in social network privacy for their opinions on the site. The site sent messages to more than 2,000 registered members – each of whom who have previously "Liked" the Facebook Site Governance Page - notifying them that they have until April 27 to make their voice heard on whether recent modifications to how Facebook handles user privacy meet with their approval.

"Based on your feedback, today we announced new revisions to the proposed changes to the SRR" Facebook's message read. "Even where we did not make revisions, we have provided an explanation of the original change. We've re-opened the comment period for the new proposed SRR to provide you with another opportunity to review the proposed changes and give us feedback before we finalize them."

Facebook's previous comment period, opened after the last significant update to the SRR, closed on March 23. "We plan to review and analyze your comments over the coming days and will keep you posted on next steps" the site's administrators said at the time.

The new statement, which can be found here, does include some alterations based on that feedback. Other changes better explain some of the decisions behind Facebook's policies; for instance, those on hate speech have been further fleshed out, while the well-publicized switch from "Privacy Policy" references to "Data Use Policy" is also detailed.

"Some of our users and a number of journalists mistook the proposed update to our SRR for changes to the way we collect or use data" Facebook highlights. "Our Data Use Policy (which used to be called our privacy policy) governs how we collect and use data. We are not proposing any updates to that document at this time."

Other clarifications cover what information Facebook gathers on those without accounts. "We are not creating profiles of non-users. There are lots of instances where we would want a non-user who interacts with Facebook to be subject to our terms" Facebook writes. "For example, if a third party is on our site but is not a user, they are not permitted to scrape users' content or information as specified in Section 3.1. Just because someone doesn't happen to have a Facebook account doesn't mean they should be free to do whatever they want with the service or our users, and we wanted to make that clear."

Privacy activists are no doubt poring through the new amendments, with an eye on digging out any examples of Facebook over-extending its reach. During the last batch of tweaks, multiple users claimed they would be deleting their profiles in protest; actual numbers for how many followed through on those threats are unknown.

[via PCWorld]