Changes to Facebook’s policy on data use could be decided by each and everyone one of us that has an account on the social network. The European activists “europe-v-facebook.org”, led by a group of Austrian students, say that there have been enough comments (the threshold is 7,000) regarding Facebook’s ‘Data Use Policy‘ to force the company to put the privacy proposal to a worldwide vote.

This whole saga goes back to last year when europe-v-facebook.org filed 22 complaints with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, which partially led to the DPC issuing a report later the same year suggesting some changes to Facebook’s privacy policy. Since then there have been more suggestions put forth by both the IDPC and the German Data Protection Agency.

So how would this hypothetical Facebook vote take place? Facebook’s own “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” has this to say about it:

“If more than 7,000 users comment on the proposed change, we will also give you the opportunity to participate in a vote in which you will be provided alternatives. The vote shall be binding on us if more than 30% of all active registered users as of the date of the notice vote.”

So essentially the whole process will rely on 300 million people (give or take) actually making the effort to have their say on privacy. At the moment Facebook are just doing the due diligence by making sure that there aren’t a significant number of duplicate or spam comments within the 7,000+ responses that would necessitate the public vote.

We’ll keep you posted on how this story develops.