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Facebook Gearing Up For New Policy’s

The first week of November is always a busy and important one in America.  With elections happening across the country, it can be an overwhelming week.  Although, this year we don’t have to make any important Presidential choices, Facebook is gearing to let users vote on a new set of policy’s. 

Earlier this year, Facebook had established the System Of Governance, after users were outraged by the new set of privacy policy’s were put into place.   Soon after, Facebook had allowed users to not only comment on how they would like the policy’s to be, but also vote on the proposed changes. 

Now just months after the special election vote, Facebook is allowing users to comment and gear up for new changes the company wants to make. 

Some of the new changes Facebook wants to make include:

“Everyone” Privacy Setting. Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings. If you delete “everyone” content that you posted on Facebook, we will remove it from your Facebook profile, but have no control over its use outside of Facebook.

 

To contact you. We may contact you with service-related announcements from time to time. You may opt out of all communications except essential updates on your account notifications page. We may include content you see on Facebook in the emails we send to you.

 

When you choose to share your information with marketers. You may choose to share information with marketers or electronic commerce providers that are not associated with Facebook through on-site offers. This is entirely at your discretion and we will not provide your information to these marketers without your consent.

 
To help your friends find you. By default, we make certain information you have posted to your profile available in search results on Facebook to help your friends find you. However, you can control who has access to this information, as well as who can find you in searches, through your privacy settings. We also partner with email and instant messaging providers to help their users identify which of their contacts are Facebook users, so that we can promote Facebook to those users.

 

Deactivating or deleting your account.If you want to stop using your account you may deactivate it or delete it. When you deactivate an account, no user will be able to see it, but it will not be deleted. We save your profile information (friends, photos, interests, etc.) in case you later decide to reactivate your account. Many users deactivate their accounts for temporary reasons and in doing so are asking us to maintain their information until they return to Facebook. You will still have the ability to reactivate your account and restore your profile in its entirety. When you delete an account, it is permanently deleted. You should only delete your account if you are certain you never want to reactivate it. You may deactivate your account on your account settings page or delete your account on this help page.

 
Backup copies. Removed and deleted information may persist in backup copies for up to 90 days, but will not be available to others.

To read the entire list of changed and read the Privacy Policy proposal, check out the Document tab of System of Governance’s page.  Comments will be accepted through this Thursday, November 5, 2009 at Noon PST.  From there, Facebook will review all the comments and suggestions.  They will make changes and have users cast their votes later on this month. 

Facebook’s Elliot Schrage said, “Our primary goals remain transparency and readability, which is why we’ve used plain language and included numerous examples to help illustrate our points.”