Facebook to introduce ‘clear history’ for all users by end-2019

“The new ‘clear history’ feature by Facebook will reportedly allow users to access their usage history, apps and activities, and delete or disable such tracking.”

Facebook is reportedly set to introduce a new ‘clear history’ feature for all users, by end 2019. The feature, which has been in discussions since Facebook’s infamous Cambridge Analytica data collection scandal, is being designed to give some sort of control to users over how much of their data would remain within Facebook’s servers, and what the social medium can collect based on user actions.

The move was confirmed by Facebook’s chief financial officer, David Wehner. According to him, while it will indeed enhance user privacy, it will also restrict and pose difficulty to Facebook in its primary revenue model of targeted advertisements. Until now, Facebook’s algorithms make use of a user’s past and present usage trends and behaviours to gauge which product, location and demographic they belong to, and then serve advertisements based on what a user is likely to have interest in.

With the new ‘clear history’ feature, users will be able to see the pages, apps and URLs that they have accessed through their Facebook account and its interconnected websites. They can then delete any information that they deem fit, and going by the sound of it, Facebook claims that this information, if asked for later, will not be available since it will be deleted from Facebook’s servers, entirely.

Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has been in the firing line a bit too often in recent times because of Facebook and its privacy centric woes, has further stated that alongside having the ability to delete all the stored information, users will also be able decide whether or not would they even want these information to be stored, or not. Facebook has faced a heavy round of backlash after it was discovered that instead of killing off its surveillance tool-like Onavo VPN, it essentially renamed the service into Facebook Research, and was running it outside the scope of legally approved beta programs.

Facebook will hope that tools such as ‘clear history’ will help it answer the massive amount of negative feedback that it has generated of late. It remains to be seen how the feature is implemented, and how much privacy control is included in it for the end-user.

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