Facebook voters protest privacy changes

Facebook is free to implement controversial changes to its privacy policies after online voters failed to meet the threshold Monday needed to make their rejection of the proposal binding on the social networking company, dpa reported.

Facebook had asked its approximately 1 billion members on December 3 to vote on ending a 2009 policy that made changes to privacy guidelines subject to user approval.

Facebook wanted to loosen restrictions on who can message you on Facebook and to share information with its affiliates, including popular photo-sharing service Instagram.

The vote was the largest in Facebook's history with 589,141 people rejecting the changes and only 79,731 supporting them. However, the number of voters fell far short of the 30 per cent of Facebook members needed to make the vote binding.

The vote was scheduled after Facebook's proposed changes to the site's governance were attacked by privacy groups, including Electronic Privacy Information Centre and the Centre for Digital Democracy.