• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, May 24, 2018

Trying to appease European regulators, Facebook is encouraging its more than 2 billion users to carefully review their privacy settings.

“We’re asking everyone on Facebook to review important information about privacy and how to control their experience,” Erin Egan, Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook, notes in a new blog post.

In the form of an alert on users’ News Feed, the tech titan is asking everyone to review everything from the ads they see to face recognition to the information they share in their profiles.

In preparation for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Facebook already launched a similar educational effort in the European Union.

The broader rollout keeps a recent promise made by Mark Zuckerberg, and is just one of many changes designed to assuage widespread criticism over Facebook’s privacy shortcomings.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica controversy, Facebook undated its data policy, and endeavored to make its privacy controls easier to find.

Now, over the coming weeks, Facebook plans to show users customized messages explaining how it targets ads; political, religious, and relationship information they’ve chosen to include on their profiles; and how it uses face recognition.

Users can expect to see a summary of the choices they’ve already made, but they won’t see information about those features they’ve already disabled or decided not to use.

For example, if users have already disabled face recognition, Facebook is promising not to push them to activate that feature.

Along with its rivals, Facebook has been bracing for the GDPR for some time. Asking users if their data can be used to power targeted advertising and facial recognition technology is part of an effort to comply with comprehensive European data law.

Last month, Facebook CFO David Wehner said he did not expect the GDPR to “significantly” impact ad revenue.