A U.S. judge has given preliminary approval of Facebook’s proposed settlement to a class-action lawsuit claiming the company violated privacy rights, Reuters reports. The judge says the settlement, Facebook’s second attempt, “falls within the range of possible approval as fair, reasonable and adequate.” Class members and others will have an opportunity to object to the settlement before it goes to final approval. A fairness hearing is scheduled for June 28, 2013. Meanwhile, the company has opened voting for its latest proposal to change user privacy settings. The vote is open until Monday, December 10, to all Facebook users and may determine whether its roughly one billion users will have the ability to vote on privacy changes going forward; the vote is only binding if 30 percent of users participate. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Digital Democracy have written to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg urging him to “withdraw the proposed changes” as they “raise privacy risks for users, may be contrary to law and violate your previous commitments to users about site governance.”
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