The University of Cambridge's Computing Laboratoryhas slammed
Facebook's attempt to give users a democratic vote on its
controversial
Terms of Use document.
Users can vote from now until Thursday on whether to accept the
Terms of Use, but the researchers at Cambridge said that their vote
would have little real impact.
The researchers warned that simple principles at the start of
the
Facebook
documents are deceptively overridden by detailed legal language
later onthat users are unlikely to understand.
PhD students Jonathan Anderson and Joseph Bonneau have been
researching Facebook privacy and publishingpapers describing its
flaws. In a
nine page paper the researchers found that the voting process
was full of loopholes, and stated that voting was effectivelya
publicity stunt.
The researchers claim that none of the substantive points has
been addressed, and the revised document is effectively identical
to the original version, with merely superficial changes. Facebook
has given its users seven days in which to vote to either accept
the new terms or to stick with the old version.
Anderson, said,"Users ought to be really angry that Facebook
thinks they can be so easily fooled; this vote is a sham, a
meaningless choice between two documents written by Facebook which
incorporate nouser feedback".
Professor Ross Anderson, at the universitysaid,"Facebook has
wasted the opportunity to create a new structure for a social
networking site. We should not be surprised that corporations do
not want to give power to their users, but pretending that the site
is democratic when it is not is offensive - it is reminiscent of
the old German Democratic Republic, which was actually a Russian
colony and not democratic at all".