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.
The company’s proposed new data use policy, unveiled on Thursday, improves on the dense legalese common in most companies’ privacy policies. It is organized by common questions such as “What kinds of information do we collect?” and “How can I manage or delete information about me?”
The new policy, which won’t be finalized for at least seven days while the company solicits comments from users, is also accompanied by a new feature called “Privacy Basics.” Using simple animations, the company tries to explain some of Facebook’s complex privacy controls, including how to limit who sees your posts and how to block people who are bothering you on the service.
“The idea here is to give people more accessible information about how Facebook works,” said Erin Egan, the company’s chief privacy officer, in an interview. “It’s simpler, it’s easier to read.”
The explanations are, for the most part, helpful, continuing Facebook’s recent attempts through tools like the privacy dinosaur to educate people about its many privacy settings.
However, the explanation of how the news feed works is misleading, suggesting that if you like a company’s page, you will see its posts in your feed. As every brand knows — and Facebook’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, recently admitted — most posts made by a company will never show up in the news feed of the average fan.
Facebook’s computer algorithms prioritize other items posted by other people over those from brands, and companies generally have to buy an ad if they want to make themselves seen. But prompting more users to like more company pages does give Facebook more data to help it target ads.
Also noticeably absent from the new privacy explanations is the simple fact that Facebook users have very little control over how their information is used in advertising. The company asserts the right to use anything you do on Facebook to help it target ads to you, both on and off the service.
Facebook even tracks what you do on other websites and will use that information for advertising, too, unless you explicitly opt out of the extra tracking — an option that requires a trip to a third-party website or soon, the tweak of a setting on your mobile phone.
In Mr. Zuckerberg’s view, advertising is valuable content, just like a baby photo posted by your best friend. So the new Privacy Basics tutorial encourages you to take advantage of Facebook’s Ad Preferences tool, which allows you to tell the company what topics you are interested in so that you get more ads on those topics.
Ad preferences were first turned on in the United States in June, and the social network is now rolling them out to its users in the Britain, Ireland, Germany, France and Australia.
Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president overseeing the marketing of its ads products, said that American users who have tried setting their ad preferences have told the company that they “feel more in control” over the ads they see. Facebook also makes more money from ads that are better targeted and garner more likes or other interactions from the people who see them.
Ms. Egan said the company’s privacy tutorials were a work in progress, with 15 animated explanations now being posted and more to come. “If you want to post a photo, we’ll walk you through it,” she said.