Facebook Tries to Explain Its Privacy Settings but Advertising Still Rules

Facebook is 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. Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy and a frequent critic of Facebook’s privacy practices, said that the announcements follow the company’s traditional pattern. “They suffer from repeated ‘we will do better privacy while we actually collect more of your data’ syndrome,” he wrote in an email. “Facebook users need to be given actual control over its data-driven marketing system.”