On Friday, June 8, Facebook stopped taking votes on its new data use policy and new statement of rights and responsibilities. The company had encouraged users to vote, but the awareness simply didn't seem to be there.

342,632 votes were cast - far away from the 270 million needed. As a result of the low turnout, Facebook will be using the vote in an advisory manner to consider the changes to its new policies.

The vote was prompted by a group called Europe v. Facebook, who was opposed to Facebook's data use policies. An example is the lack of transparency in collected information, how long it's kept, whom the company shares the data with, and making some data collection opt-in and not opt-out.

Facebook had encouraged users to leave comments and reach the threshold so the policy can be changed. Just under 300,000 users voted against the policy, and 45,000 for it.

According to Ars Technica, Facebook didn't make users aware of voting outside of the Site Governance Page which has 2 million Likes. Even Europe v. Facebook also made few efforts to promote voting outside of tracking the number of votes.

"[P]erhaps they knew that getting 270 million people to participate in anything, especially something as dry as a vote on a privacy policy change, would be a pipe dream," Ars Technica said.

After the votes ended, Europe v. Facebook called the voting system a "farce" and said Facebook had a "Chinese understanding of democracy."

As Ars Technica also noted, there's the question over whether Facebook was truly committed to the vote - there was little awareness from casual users. Not advertising the vote widely could not only anger people who would have voted, but it looks like a half-hearted attempt by Facebook to appease users who don't like the changes.

"Compare and contrast to Google, which placed a link to its new privacy policy under the search box on its home page, for every user, a few weeks before the policy went into effect," Ars Technica added.