Facebook users given power over the website

Palo Alto, California, February 27: Facebook users are now given a chance to voice out their opinions as the company announced that they will be allowing users to comment and vote on the site’s terms of service.

On Thursday, Facebook Inc. gave their 175 million users the power to create the future rules that will govern the social networking site by leaving feedbacks, suggestions and votes.

The company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said, “This is really about us trusting our users.”

Before changes are made, the company will give users the chance to review them and will enact the said change depending on the reaction it obtained.

Zuckerberg said that this move “will help strengthen the community”. He also added, “We can’t just put up new terms of service without everyone’s permission.”

Zuckerberg also released a statement through their blog explaining: “Our main goal at Facebook is to help make the world more open and transparent. We believe that if we want to lead the world in this direction, then we must set an example by running our service in this way.

“We sat down to work on documents that could be the foundation of this and we came to an interesting realization—that the conventional business practices around a Terms of Use document are just too restrictive to achieve these goals.

“We decided we needed to do things differently and so we're going to develop new policies that will govern our system from the ground up in an open and transparent way.”

Facebook has already released two documents, “Facebook Principles” and the “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities”, which will replace Facebook’s existing “Terms of Use”.

Just a week ago, many Facebook users reacted negatively to the changes made by the company which stipulate that users’ data such as photos and videos will remain with Facebook even after terminating their account.

The company quickly acted on this with Zuckerberg saying, "We do not own user data. They own their own data. We never really intended to give a different impression, and we feel bad that we did."