The social media sphere has produced quite a few notable privacy controversies in recent years, a reputation that the top networks are now trying to shake off with new features aimed at enabling users to take responsibility over who can view their personal data into their own hands. Facebook Inc. is leading the way with a sleek utility designed to help members gain a better grasp of its notoriously complicated sharing settings.

The tool, aptly named Privacy Checkup, prompts first-time posters with a  popup featuring a purple dinosaur asking them to set the target audience for their messages. The default is helpfully set to “Friends” so that a potentially embracing post doesn’t end up being shared with the entire word in the likely scenario that a new user glosses over the selection menu.

From there on, every entry is assigned the same privacy settings as the previous one, a design decision Facebook explains with the reasoning that it’s “much worse for someone to accidentally share with everyone when they actually meant to share just with friends, compared with the reverse.” But the nature of the feature means that members will have to be careful with what they post after publishing messages publicly and manually change their settings when necessary.

To ensure that requirement doesn’t slip under the radar, Facebook said that Privacy Checkup will include a tutorial designed to walk users through the process of ensuring personal data is not exposed to the wrong people. The guide covers the basics of managing personal information on the social network, including controlling the visibility of profile details and identifying exactly what it is specific apps can access and who they’re sharing it with, plus best practices for posting messages. The walk through is set to launch in the coming weeks after the core service finishes rolling out to the social network’s 1.2 billion members, which the company said should be a matter of days.

The launch of Privacy Checkup, which has been in the works since at least May, was announced a day after LinkedIn Inc. starting implementing its own set of privacy improvements. Users of the business-oriented social network will now be able to view browsing sessions associated with their accounts by device and sign out any suspicious windows that may appear on the list, according to a post on the company’s blog. Additionally, the automated email notification for password changes has been expanded to contain information about the source and time of modifications and users can now download all of their profile data, including activity, search history and other details, with one click.

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