I did some further digging and on the Facebook legal terms & conditions page I found a reference to the Facebook Site Governance page, so it appears to be legitimate.

I believe you are prompted with this request for permission because I don't think this is an actual application or voting page from Facebook. This is an application from a social media company called Thuzi. The 'voting page' linked in the summary contains an iframe to https://fbgovernance.thuzi.com/. I don't think this is legitimate.

I checked the link in the summary: https://apps.facebook.com/fbsitegovernance/ and it consists of an iframe that loads the remote site https://fbgovernance.thuzi.com/.

Was Thuzi contracted by Facebook to perform this vote? Why would they be? Thuzi appears to be some sort of online social media marketing firm. Looks fishy to me.

Ok, well let's think back to 25 years ago. 25 years ago was 1987, what storage medium was around back then that we could read easily now? 3.5" floppies were around, the 1.44mb high density format was brand new for 1987, how easy is it to read a 3.5" floppy disk these days? No computer comes with a floppy drive, you'd probably be able to find a USB floppy drive so it IS possible to read the disk (if the disk is still good). So it is perfectly understandable to be concerned if media from 2012 will be usable in 2037, despite your believe that the obsolete hardware craze is 'overrated.'

Personally, I'd store whatever on raw media like an SD card, since readers may exist in the future for SD->whatever-new-interfacethereis. A hard drive in 1987 may have had an MFM interface to it, see many MFM->SATA interfaces these days? Nope. But do you see floppy->USB interfances? Yup. So that's why I'd stick with a raw storage format like a floppy or SD card, and not stick to something with its own interface like IDE, SATA, or USB.

The headline states that the laws are only available via a $200 license, but that is not the case. The laws currently exist in two forms, a paper version and an electronic version that is stored in a proprietary format. The paper copy is held in multiple 3-ring binders and would cost $656 to reproduce, and in order to read the proprietary electronic format you would need to license the software required for $200. No one ever said the laws themselves were copyrighted. They are also available to view for free in multiple public locations, "White said copies of the code, with updates early this year, are on file at the Schenectady Public Library, Schenectady County Supreme Court Library, the Schenectady County Community College Library and several other locations."

So you can see that no one is preventing anyone from viewing the laws, the problem is if you want your own personal copy it just isn't financially feasible at this time. Luckily the city realizes this and they're working to get a copy of the code online, which will be accessible for free. It shouldn't be this difficult to view city laws electronically so searching is simpler, and this is a good example of why we shouldn't use proprietary formats. Although your content is owned by you, you're limited to what you can do with it because of the format it's in.