Facebook assures users on ad policy

If you post something on Facebook, let there be no doubt that it can end up as an ad shown to your friends and acquaintances.

Facebook pressed forward on Friday with official changes to its privacy policies, first proposed in August, that make the terms of using Facebook more clear than ever: By having an account on the service, its 1.2 billion global users are allowing the company to use their postings and other personal data for advertising.

And, teenagers are no exception. Although the company deleted language that said parents were implicitly consenting to ads featuring their children's posts by letting them use Facebook, the company said it was already getting that permission when teenagers sign up to use the service. After the proposed changes were originally announced, they drew an outcry from many users, some privacy groups and members of Congress, and prompted the Federal Trade Commission to scrutinise the company's plans.

"Your feedback was clear - we can do better - and it led to a number of clarifying edits," the company wrote in a blog post on Friday announcing the final version of the policies, which went into effect immediately.

But in the end, the edits didn't add up to anything major, according to both the company and its critics.

The new terms of use do not affect a separate change that the company announced last month that allows teenagers to post status updates, videos and images that can be seen by anyone, not just their friends or people who know their friends. However, Friday's change does fit into a broader pattern: Facebook is pushing its users to share more data while also making that information easier to find. That is raising public awareness of just what it means to post content on the service.

"Every day, people post billions of pieces of content and connections into the graph and in doing this, they're helping to build the clearest model of everything there is to know in the world," Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, told Wall Street analysts in a conference call last month. "This has the potential to be really powerful, but right now, we actually do very little to utilise the knowledge that people have shared to benefit everyone in our community."