Facebook continued to use its “Blue Dinosaur,” this time with a global rollouts of its privacy checkups
Facebook FB -0.54%’s Blue Dinosaur is going mainstream.
Five months after Facebook introduced a cartoon animal to select users to teach them about its privacy settings, the social network said it will show the dinosaur to all of its 1.3 billion members.
The dinosaur leads users through a three-step “privacy checkup” that guides users on how to control their profile information, Facebook posts and access to their profile information by other apps. Users can also launch the checkup from the privacy shortcut menu in the upper-right portion of their desktop computer screens.
Facebook began offering animated help with its privacy settings in April, when users posting publicly were greeted by a concerned dinosaur, checking whether the impending post was really intended for the world.
In May, Facebook expanded the privacy checkup to include the guided tour, but only for a small number of test subjects.
Paddy Underwood, a product manager on Facebook’s privacy team, said more than three-fourths of users who saw the blue dinosaur completed the checkup. Of those, about three-fourths rated it helpful in a Facebook survey.
Underwood said the privacy checkup didn’t affect user behavior in any noticeable way. But that wasn’t the point. By giving people privacy checkups, Facebook aims to steer people away from social-media blunders, such as sharing what was intended as a private message with the whole world. Those mistakes could drive people off Facebook.
Facebook, frequently criticized by privacy advocates for confusing and shifting privacy settings, has invested significant resources in making the settings more user-friendly. By doing so, Facebook can’t lose. As long as users post and share, Facebook gathers more data it can use to sell targeted advertisements based on users’ interests.
The tools highlighted by the blue dinosaur, which will appear on computer screens all over the world starting Thursday, are rudimentary. Underwood said users can explore and test more sophisticated tools as well.
For now, the dinosaur and the checkup are only available on personal computers. Facebook said it is working to bring the blue dinosaur to smartphones.
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