Information & Ethics committee  We think user control, user trust, is an essential part of the Facebook experience, and it's an issue that we spend a lot of time thinking about. We understand that people won't feel comfortable using our site if they don't trust us, so we want to do everything we can to be transparent about how Facebook works and how people can have control over their data.

Information & Ethics committee  That's an important point. I think the relationship you have with your friends is different from what Facebook has with service providers and other kinds of entities with which we interact. We do provide controls in many cases. For example, we have application controls that let you choose the circumstances under which applications and websites can get access to your information.

Information & Ethics committee  With regard to your music interests, for example, we allow advertisers to make a judgment that they want to show advertisements to people who like a particular type of music. In those instances we may show the advertisement; we may identify that you like that music because you have told us on your timeline, but we won't then tell the advertisers “this particular person likes this kind of music” unless you have chosen to make that information public.

Information & Ethics committee  We do have a relationship with the Canadian Privacy Commissioner. In fact, we find that relationship to be very productive and positive. We're able to talk with them about decisions that we make from a privacy standpoint and get their feedback, which I think helps us make a better product and helps us better protect the privacy of Canadians.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much for your question. As a preliminary matter, you listed a number of pieces of information that Facebook receives, and we describe in our data use policy the various ways that we may receive information from our users. It's important to point out that we don't have that information about all of our users, so we rely on the information that people choose to give to us.

Information & Ethics committee  I do very little defriending, but I'm familiar with the process.

Information & Ethics committee  In general we hope that people have a positive experience on Facebook and want to communicate. But we know there are situations in which people want to stop the communication, so we have a number of mechanisms in place to address that situation. The first is the ability to unfriend somebody, which essentially is when you've engaged in a relationship with them on Facebook and you decide you want to terminate that relationship.

Information & Ethics committee  There are two different processes that we allow people to use in addition to downloading their information, which is the process that allows them to gain access to their information. You can do that without deleting your Facebook account. But assuming you've decided to sign off of Facebook, we provide two options.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for the question. When I said that we have different retention periods for different items, the reason is that we keep information for different purposes. In general, we want to have information in our records for only as long as it's needed to provide services. For example, if you post something on your timeline, there's no fixed retention period that's associated with that.

Information & Ethics committee  We do. We take the safety of underage users, minor users, of Facebook very seriously. We actually have a dedicated manager on my team who focuses exclusively on those issues. The reason is that it's an important issue, not just to us who work on privacy, but to everyone at the company.

Information & Ethics committee  Our services are operated in Canada and the U.S. by Facebook, Inc., which is based in Menlo Park, California, and by Dublin-based Facebook Ireland Limited in the rest of the world. Our primary regulators are the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. and the Irish Data Protection Commissioner in Ireland.

Information & Ethics committee  In general, we try to operate our service in a way that is consistent globally. We want everybody on Facebook to have the same experience. When we make privacy decisions, we try to make them in a way that works for all of our users in all the jurisdictions where we have relationships.

Information & Ethics committee  When I referred to general information, what I meant was aggregated information. When we show advertisements to large groups of users, we may tell the advertiser general information about the people in that group. For example, we might say this advertisement was shown to 100,000 people, or we might say 50% of the people who saw your advertisement told us they were male.

Information & Ethics committee  With regard to the information that we provide to advertisers, again, there's no information specific to individuals in an identifiable way. I'm aware that there are some advertisers who have a practice of linking up this information. We do provide some analytics in a general way across large groups of people about off-line purchasing behaviour, and that's something we've talked about on our privacy page and we've explained to people how we do that in a privacy-sensitive way.

Information & Ethics committee  I appreciate your comments with regard to the data use policy and the statement of rights and responsibilities. We take very seriously the obligation to be transparent with our users. We try to present information about our data use practices in a number of different ways that are easy for people to understand.