Facebook is kicking off its F8 conference by heading off everyone’s most pertinent question: What is the platform doing to address user data concerns? The answer, it seems, is Clear History, a new feature the social network is building to give users more control over the information it collects from your browsing history.
By popular demand from users and Congresspeople alike, Facebook’s chief privacy officer announced in a post that Clear History will be both a monitoring tool and a set of controls. It allows users to see which websites and apps using Facebook ads and analytics (including those with the ‘Like’ button) send your browsing information back to the social network. Then users are given the choice to stop associating this data with their personal account.
These sites will still collect data on user activity and send it to Facebook, but if a user opts-out under Clear History’s settings, the social platform won’t link the info to your personal account. This may sound trivial, but it means when the network repackages that information into advertising insights to sell to sites and apps, user data is folded into general demographic insights not personally-identifying info.
As Facebook is only just announcing Clear History, it’s unclear when the feature will go live for users.
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