Facebook, ever the defender of personal privacy, is giving users just a few days to vote down changes to their privacy policy.  Failure to garner votes from 30% of Facebook’s users means the social media giant will no longer allow users to vote on privacy policy issues.

So, if you value your privacy on Facebook and want some small amount of control over what they do with YOUR personal information, vote now.

If you haven’t cast your vote by Monday, December 10th, 2012 you will be too late.

To quote the Yahoo News story about this:

So far, the vote stands at less than half a million, but is around six to one against the new Statement of Rights and Data Usage Policy.

The wording of the vote itself is not a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ – to vote against, users have to select, ‘Existing Documents: The current SRR and Data Use Policy’ as opposed to ‘Proposed Documents: The proposed SRR and Data Use Policy’.

Privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Activism Director Rainey Reitman says, “The voting system currently in place doesn’t work; it is simply impossible to get 30% of the users (300 million individuals) to vote on anything on Facebook within 30 days.”

“The overwhelming majority of users participating in the vote right now are voting against removing the voting system.”

“We believe this shows that Facebook users are concerned that their voices will not be heard, and do not want to lose the ability have a say in site governance.  While the vote may never end up binding Facebook, voters are sending a message about a serious concern, and one we hope Facebook respects and responds to.”

Facebook claims that the change is to streamline ‘voting’ in favour of a system that allows “meaningful feedback”.