By Elliot Schrage, Vice President, Communications, Public Policy and Marketing

Yesterday we concluded our seven-day global site governance vote on the proposed updates to our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR) and Data Use Policy.

An external auditor has reviewed and confirmed the final results. Of the 668,872 people who voted, 589,141 recommended we keep our existing SRR and Data Use Policy. We made substantial efforts to inform our users and encourage them to vote, both through emails and their news feeds. Despite these efforts and widespread media coverage, less than one percent of our user community of more than one billion participated. As stated in both policies, the results are advisory unless more than 30% of users vote.

While participation in the vote was minimal, this experience illustrated the clear value of our notice and comment process. Your substantive feedback on our proposals during the seven-day comment period, along with discussions with our global regulators, resulted in clarifications and revisions to those proposals. For example, we added new language to clarify our proposed updates on sharing information with our affiliates and our privacy controls. After considering these factors, we have decided to adopt the proposed updates to our SRR and Data Use Policy. You can view the final documents, which will go into effect today, by using the following links: Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Data Use Policy.

We understand that many of you feel strongly about maintaining the participatory nature of our site governance process. We do too. We believe that having a meaningful dialogue with our community through our notice and comment process is core to that effort moving forward. We also plan to explore and implement new, innovative and effective ways to enhance this process in order to maximize user engagement.

Thank you again for participating in our site governance process. We hope you’ll stay vocal and involved. You can like the Facebook and Privacy Page to learn more about upcoming opportunities to communicate with us about protecting your information on Facebook. Additionally, you can like the Facebook Site Governance Page to be notified of future proposed changes to our SRR and Data Use Policy.