Facebook Inc. has been around for years and gained millions of users, but despite how very popular the social networking service is, many of its users still have trouble navigating Facebook’s myriad of privacy settings. While the public nature of social networking seems to fly in the face of privacy, a cultural shift demands more privacy options and user controls over uploaded content. Today, Facebook released a revised version of its privacy policy, also launching an accompanying tutorial that is far easier to understand and follow.

“Today, we’re introducing Privacy Basics, which gives you tips and a how-to guide for taking charge of your experience on Facebook. We’re also proposing updates to our terms, data policy and cookies policy to reflect new features we’ve been working on. And we’re continuing to improve ads based on the apps and sites you use and expanding your control over this kind of advertising. For the next 7 days, you’ll be able to submit comments and suggestions about our updates,” Facebook wrote.

Privacy Basics

Privacy Basics teaches Facebook users how to better protect their accounts, divided into three categories: What others see about you, How others interact with you, and What you see.

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What others see about you

This section demonstrates how you can filter what content is visible to your audience as well as which audience can see your posts, photos, videos and other content you share.

This section is further divided into eight subsections including Posts, Deleting Posts, Profile, Friend List, Search, Likes & Comments, Tagging, Account Deactivation & Deletion. You can click each section to expand it and you’ll be presented with written instructions as well as images to help you better understand how to proceed.

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How others interact with you

In this section you will be presented with tutorials on how to edit content on your Timeline, edit who can comment and like your posts, what to do if you don’t want to be tagged in photos, unfriending people and even blocking them, as well as how to secure your account with log in options and changing passwords.

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What you see

This sections allows you to edit what content you see from your friends as well as advertisers. This section teaches you how to follow and unfollow friends, what posts you are interested in seeing from pages you follow, and what content you do not care for.

Facebook is laced with ads and it’s pretty annoying, but it’s also the reason why the service is still free to use. If you want to know why you are seeing certain ads that you may have no interest for, you can click on the menu on the upper right corner of the ad and click on ‘Why am I seeing this?’ If you don’t want to see certain ads, click on ‘Manage your ad preference’ and choose which ad category you are interested in. To remove ads from certain brands from appearing on your News Feed, click on the menu on the upper right corner of the ad post, and select ‘Hide all from [name of the brand]’ Following these steps will not eliminate all those annoying ads but at least it will filter the ads you see on your News Feed.

Aside from its revamped privacy policy and privacy tutorial, Facebook has also been busy introducing a new feature in time for the holidays.

Say Thanks

It’s not often we say thank you to our friends and family, are rarely do we have the opportunity to make an awesome video with minimal effort. Say Thanks is a custom video feature that allows Facebook users to send personalized thank-you-videos to friends and family members. The feature takes photos and videos of you and the person you want to thank. You can edit which photos and videos will be included in the one-minute clip.

It’s a simple way of saying thank you. It’s like the Facebook Lookback video released earlier this year, but now you get to choose a recipient for your video.

Say Thanks is available on desktop and mobile and is available in English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish languages.

photo credit: mkhmarketing via photopin cc