In Pics: Facebook answers the most-asked questions about privacy

1. Profile Information including contact information, information in the About You and Life Events section

2. Location History, received through Location Services on their device

3. Logs of your calls and messages that you've chosen to share in your device settings

4. History of users’ logins, logouts, periods of time that they've been active on Facebook and the devices you use to access Facebook

5. People you’re friends with on the platform and messages you’ve exchanged using Messenger

6. Apps and websites you’ve logged in to using your Facebook profile

7. Information you've submitted to advertisers or what they’ve collected directly from you

8. A history of your searches on Facebook

1. Facebook Profile Picture Guard: Created specifically for India, an optional profile picture guard ensures that:

a) Other users will no longer be able to download, share or send your profile picture in a message on Facebook

b) People you’re not friends with on Facebook won’t be able to tag anyone, including themselves, in your profile picture

c) Where possible, Facebook prevents others from taking a screenshot of your profile picture on Facebook (available only on Android devices)

2. A display of blue border and shield around your profile picture as a visual cue of protection

Every time you post a status update, photo or video, you can choose who can see it. Use the menu at the top of your post to choose your audience. Choose which groups of people you want to be able to see the post.

1. To stop someone from bothering you, you can either unfriend or block them. Anyone you unfriend or block will not be notified.

2. Blocking someone means you won’t be friends anymore and they won’t be able to:

a) Add you as a friend.

b) See things you post on your profile (as long as it isn’t shared publicly).

c) Tag you.

d) Invite you to events or groups.

e) Start a conversation with you.

- Someone you block might still see things such as if you like or comment on someone else’s post or share something in a group you’re both in.

1. Many websites and apps use Facebook services to make their content and ads more engaging and relevant. These services include:

a) Social plugins, such as our Like and Share buttons, which make other sites more social and help you share content on Facebook

b) Facebook Login, which lets you use your Facebook account to log into another website or app

c) Facebook Analytics, which helps websites and apps better understand how people use their services; and

d) Facebook ads and measurement tools, which enable websites and apps to show ads from Facebook advertisers, to run their own ads on Facebook or elsewhere, and to understand the effectiveness of their ads.

When you visit a site or app that uses our services, Facebook receives information even if you’re logged out or don’t have an account. This is because other apps and sites don’t know who is using Facebook.

1. Apps and websites that use our services, such as the Like button or Facebook Analytics, send information to Facebook to make their content and ads better.

2. When you visit a website, your browser (for example Chrome, Safari or Firefox) sends a request to the site’s server. A website typically sends two things back to your browser: first, content from that site; and second, instructions for the browser to send your request to the other companies providing content or services on the site. So when a website uses one of our services, your browser sends the same kinds of information to Facebook as the website receives. It also gets information about which website or app you’re using, which is necessary to know when to provide the tools.

3. This happens for any other service the site is using. For example, when you see a YouTube video on a site that’s not YouTube, it tells your browser to request the video from YouTube. YouTube then sends it to you.

- News Feed preferences lets you choose which content you see first and hide content you don’t want to see in your feed. You can also view your News Feed chronologically instead of ranked by what Facebook predicts you might be most interested in.

- Ad preferences shows you the advertisers whose ads you might be seeing because you visited their sites or apps. You can remove any of these advertisers to stop seeing their ads.

In addition, you can opt out of these types of ads entirely — so you never see ads based on information Facebook has received from other websites and apps. Further, if you don’t want us to use your Facebook interests to show you ads on other websites and apps, there’s a control for that too.

You can’t opt out of ads altogether because ads are what keeps Facebook free, but you do have different options to control how your data can and can’t be used to show you ads. They’re all found in ad preferences.