Our commitment to making advertising work for people and businesses

We build products to help people connect with the people and content they care about. We're committed to ensuring that time spent on Facebook is time well spent and contributes positively to people's well being. That's why earlier this year, we updated the way in which content is ranked in News Feed to prioritise posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people. And as we said in 2016, we've learned that when we create value for people, we also create opportunities for developers, charities and businesses.

We don't sell people's data. Full stop. To advertisers or to anyone else. Protecting people's information is the most important thing we do at Facebook.

Our advertising system is designed to help businesses reach people likely to be interested in their offerings without sharing any personal information with advertisers. For example, let's say a hair salon wants to reach people over 18 years old in their town. Our system will show its ads to people who meet those criteria, without sharing any personal information about who those people are. This has always been the way our ad system works.

And while protecting people's information has always been fundamental to our platform, we recently implemented additional safeguards around the information that we use for advertising. For example, last month we announced that we will be shutting down Partner Categories, which previously enabled third-party data providers to offer their targeting directly on Facebook. While this is a common industry practice, we believe that this step will help improve people's privacy on Facebook. We also made several changes to our platform APIs to limit the information that third-party apps and developers can access, and tightened our review process for apps requesting access to Facebook Login information. We'll continue to restrict the way in which others access our tools in product areas such as search and account recovery, call and text messaging histories, and ad targeting.

We believe that people should be able to control the type of ads they see. And we want everyone to be able to understand why specific ads were shown to them. That's why we offer ad preferences, so people can choose which interests – such as travel or skiing – they want to see ads about, and which interests they want to remove. People can also learn why they are seeing a specific ad by tapping "Why am I seeing this?" in the top right-hand corner of any ad.

People should have control over their information. That's why we're building Clear History to enable people to see the websites and apps that share information with Facebook when people use them. People will be able to delete this information from their account and turn off our ability to store it going forwards. We use this information to make people's experience on Facebook better, but we believe that it should be up to each person to decide what information to share with us.

We're also giving people more control over how their information is used under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While these controls were built in compliance with the GDPR, we're going beyond those requirements to ensure that people everywhere understand their privacy choices on Facebook. We're asking everyone, no matter where they live, to review important information about how Facebook uses their information and make decisions about ads based on data from partners and information in their profile. We've also updated our Data Policy to clearly explain how our system uses information to show people relevant ads.

People should know who's running the ads that they're seeing and what other ads those entities are running. That's why we've built new transparency and authenticity features such as view ads, which enables people to see all active ads that a Page is running, including political ads. We're currently testing this feature in Canada and Ireland, and we'll be rolling it out to more countries soon.

To help protect the integrity of elections and prevent bad actors from interfering, we're taking additional steps to ensure transparency and authenticity for political advertisers. We recently announced an authorisation process to verify identity, location and funding for advertisers running political ads. Soon, people who see political ads on Facebook will notice a "Political ad" label in the top left-hand corner of the ad with "Paid for by" information next to it.

We're also making it possible for people to see all ads with the Political ad label by launching a public, searchable ads archive. The ads archive will include each ad's content as well as additional information such as the amount spent on the ad and demographic information about the audience reached.

We want everyone to feel safe using Facebook. Our Community Standards define what content is allowed on our platforms, and we hold ads to even stricter standards than organic content. We do not tolerate hate, discrimination or threats of violence on our platforms. Our Advertising Policies are designed to not only prohibit clearly inappropriate content, such as hate speech, pornography and illegal drugs, but also limit ads that people may find offensive.

While we review every ad before it appears on our platforms, we also encourage everyone on our platforms to report ads that they believe breach our policies. We hope that by making advertising more transparent, this task will be easier. To improve enforcement, we recently tightened restrictions on ad content to ensure higher standards of transparency and authenticity, and announced plans to add more than one thousand people to our global ads review team over the next year.

We're in the business of empowering every business to connect with customers and grow. We believe that no matter your size or your budget, your business can flourish. That's why we designed advertising on Facebook to drive results whether you're spending GBP 1, GBP 100 or GBP 1,000,000.

We're committed to giving every business owner and marketer the tools they need to succeed on our platforms. That's why we've launched Facebook Community Boost to help small businesses discover how to grow their business on Facebook and equip more people with digital skills. Facebook Community Boost will visit cities around the world this year to provide free in-person training and offer advice from Facebook and business experts.

We build advertising solutions to fit seamlessly into people's experience on our platforms. This means creating ad formats for all the ways in which people consume content, from stories read in seconds to long-form videos that captivate viewers.

Just as our ad formats are evolving, we're also improving our measurement solutions to make it easier for advertisers to understand the results of their campaigns. Earlier this year, we made ad metrics clearer by adding new labels to some of our metrics to show how they're calculated, and by removing some other metrics to help advertisers focus on the more meaningful ones.

We will continue to strengthen our advertising solutions and earn the investments that businesses make with us. We know that we have more to do, and we're working hard to earn your trust and deliver a great experience.