It’s almost been a year since Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that they’re working on a Clear History button that would let users clear all the traces of what they’re doing on the social network, whenever they wanted to and without actually deleting their account. This would have been a great way for the beleaguered company to save a little face in the wake of all the privacy and security issues that they’ve been dealing with the past couple of years. But here we are, almost a year later, with no sign of this promised tool and with even more concerns about the data that we let Facebook have access to.
The way that Zuckerberg described it back then was that this Clear History tool would be available for users who want to have more control over what Facebook sees in their history, like what they’ve clicked on, the websites they visited from within the app, what they liked and commented on, etc. With supposedly just one click, you’ll be able to clear the history and cookies from the app, although he did warn that it can make your “experience worse” since Facebook has to relearn your preferences every time.
The last time that this tool was mentioned was a couple of months ago at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2019 in San Francisco. Facebook CFO David Wehner said that they will be launching the Clear History tool later this year. He emphasized that this will affect their ability to do third-party targeting. He did also mention that he thinks this will give them the ability to “target as effectively as before”.
But we haven’t heard anything more about this and given his demeanor about that tool, we probably cannot expect it to give users any kind of control, even as they promise it will do so. The latest issue that users learned about Facebook (and Instagram as well) is that it saved millions of passwords on a readable text file. And while they said they found no evidence of abuse or wrongdoing from any of their employees, do we actually believe them at this point.
The easiest way, of course, would be to just delete your account and be done with Facebook. However, a lot of us cannot do so at this point whether for personal or professional reasons. So having a Clear History button would go a long way, if it functioned as it’s supposed to, that is. Let’s see if we’ll get it. We have 8 months to go in 2019.
