<p>What is the deal with this:</p>
<p>Facebook, Inc. and Facebook Ireland Ltd., which together operate the Facebook service worldwide, recently posted some proposed updates…</p>
<p>I got that email today also. I have no idea what it means.
I know they wrote it in English, but that didn’t help me understand it any better. Sigh.</p>
<p>Count me in as someone who received unintelligible email and was left scratching their head.</p>
<p>I’ve noticed that ads have started popping up in the center column of the Facebook page – formerly the only posts to this area were from friends and Facebook pages that I had “liked.”</p>
<p>From my understanding FB basically means what it said, i.e. even if you hide posts (yours or a friend’s) from your profile’s timeline, the post or story can still show up in your friends’ (or friends of friends depending on your privacy setting) newsfeeds or timeline. </p>
<p>**You have to delete the post not just hide it. **You can delete it from your timeline or activity log.</p>
<p>Now if for example your ex-bf tagged a photo of you hugging him. The photo shows up on your timeline. You hide it from your timeline. The “story” may still appear in someone’s newsfeed or timeline. You have to ask your ex to untag you OR you have to change your timeline and tagging settings OR there’s a bunch of things you can do to remain friends with him but he has limited access to your FB profile. </p>
<p>If you’re tagged in a link your friend posted and you don’t like it, do not just hide it from the timeline. Instead, click the remove tag option.</p>
<p>As for the other gobbledygook, from my interpretation, it just means that since you have a FB profile you are plugged into the matrix. So, FB will gather general info such as your gender, age, location, likes and display sponsors ads customized for you.</p>
<p>Sounds like a good time to delete my account. I never really liked Facebook anyway!</p>
<p>Facebook is all about mining the information you post and and then selling that information to other companies and advertisers. There’s no free lunch - that’s how FB makes it’s money since users don’t pay any money to use the service. </p>
<p>The bottom line - don’t expect anything you post on FB (or anywhere else) to be 100% private. It’s naive to think FB is simply a philanthropic organization providing a service of providing a social network - it’s actually a business looking to profit from the users. </p>
<p>If you’re careful about what you post and don’t have false expectations of privacy, then it might make sense to use FB.</p>
<p>They’re not the only ones who scan the content - so does Google via scanning your emails on gmail as well as tracking where you went on the internet for targeted ads, so do others. Hopefully everyone knows their gmail content is being scanned programmatically and use it accordingly.</p>