Facebook wants to make it easier for users to protect their profiles and how to keep certain items private.
A new privacy checkup tool will walk users through their privacy settings. The option to run the checkup will start popping up over the next week or two, according to Paddy Underwood, a Facebook privacy product manager. Mobile devices won't have the same option yet.
Facebook announced the privacy checkup in May. The process has three steps and will take one or two minutes. First and third steps review the privacy settings for status updates and profile information such as hometown, college, phone number and birth date. The second step reviews the apps that have access to the user's Facebook data.
Consumers and privacy watchdogs have complained about the social media site's lack of transparency about how widely users' information is shared.
"Nobody like having their stuff visible to more people than they think," Underwood told USA Today.
Facebook agreed to a 20-year privacy settlement after the Federal Trade Commission found privacy settings made in 2009 made some profile items (names, photos, gender and list of friends) public by default.
The social network continues to collect data from their customers to create targeted ads. Those specialized ads led to a 123 percent increase in Facebook's average ad prices in the most recent quarters compared to last year, according to USA Today. The company's ad revenue rose by 67 percent to $2.68 billion.
"Facebook is misleading the public to believe that its privacy checkup can really diagnose - let alone fix - its massive data gathering done daily on all its users," privacy watchdog Jeffrey Chester told USA Today. "But Facebook works closely with its biggest advertisers and partners to make sure its users provide their data, including their location."
The relationship between Facebook and advertisers can be "hazardous" to users online privacy health, Chester believes. "Facebook wants the public and regulators to believe that they are protecting consumer privacy. But the opposite is true."
