Complete Story
11/13/2014
Facebook tries to explain its privacy settings but advertising still rules
A year after Facebook last changed its privacy policies, the company is proposing another round of changes to its rules.
This time, the focus is on explaining how the service works in simpler, clearer language, including a new animated dashboard that attempts to answer common questions like how to delete a post or who can see the comments you make on someone else’s post.
But as with previous moves by the company on privacy, there is an unstated business goal: to sell more advertising based on the vast quantities of personal data that the social network has on its 1.35 billion users, both from their activities on Facebook and increasingly, their wanderings on the web and inside other mobile applications.
In pursuit of that goal, every bit of personal information is a valuable data point that the company is eager to exploit, and Facebook plans to ask users in a much broader swath of the world to share details of their interests in order to better target the ads that are shown to them.
