Facebook has been fighting a number of privacy issues in 2018, including multiple privacy breaches and bugs and compromising millions of users’ data entrusted to the company.
So, when Facebook announced that it will be bringing a new “Clear History” feature during its F8 conference earlier this year, it was a bit vague as to when this new feature will filter down to users, with an expected time frame of a couple of months for the feature to become available to users. Well, that now seems to be a bit longer, with the Clear History feature not set to be ready for testing until Spring 2019 (Autumn 2019 here).
In an interview with Recode, David Baser who is the director of product development at Facebook has said that the Clear History feature will be available for testing “by spring of 2019”, as its “taking longer”to implement the de-identification technology than the company had hoped.
Simply put, Facebook indexes data a few different ways. When Facebook stores all that data based on time and date instead of the individual user, it had trouble associating that data and history to people. Its because of this that Facebook has had to engineer a more user-centric data storage system just to enable the Clear History feature to be feasible.
Baser said in the interview that “we can’t actually stop data collection, but what we can do is strip away the identifier that would let us know whose it was.”
While we might see the feature within the next few months, nothing is clear .. including your Facebook history (for now). Watch this space.
