Facebook Clear History tool to come later this year

Facebook Clear History tool will give its 2.32 billion monthly users the ability to completely delete all of the information the social media giant collects. While the company has announced to roll out the privacy tool later this year, a top Facebook executive believes that it could hurt the business revenues.

‘The Clear History tool is going to give us some headwinds in terms of being able to target as effectively as before,’ said David Wehner, Chief Financial Officer at Facebook. Facebook is also spending several billion dollars to staff up its security and safety teams.

The Clear History tool was promised to launch last year, before the company’s F8 developer conference. At the conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the tool will work in a similar fashion as one’s clear browser history feature. With the Clear History tool, Facebook wants to rebuild the trust of its users into the platform following the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

‘In your web browser, you have a simple way to clear your cookies and history. The idea is a lot of sites need cookies to work, but you should still be able to flush your history whenever you want. We’re building a version of this for Facebook too. It will be a simple control to clear your browsing history on Facebook — what you’ve clicked on, websites you’ve visited, and so on,’ Zuckerberg said in a post.

In 2018, Facebook put a lot of data policies in place on how the third-party apps and websites collects personal information of users. The Facebook Clear History tool will give users more transparency on their information being collected, which apps are collecting it. And if they want, they can remove all of their digital history from the Facebook.

According to a report in BuzzFeed, Facebook is planning to start testing the tool later this year.

‘We want to make sure this works the way it should for everyone on Facebook, which is taking longer than expected,’ Facebook said.