Facebook starts releasing Clear History tool

Facebook has started making available its Clear History tool, which allows users to unlink information Facebook has collected about them. The tool was announced more than a year ago and is now available in three countries.

The tool will be available in Ireland, Spain and South Korea from Tuesday, Facebook writes. The functionality should be available to all users worldwide in the coming months. The arrival of the Clear History feature was announced as early as May last year, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Earlier this year, Facebook promised to release the tool this year.

The Clear History tool is part of the Off-Facebook Activity menu, where users can see information about websites and apps that track them and forward information to Facebook. The Clear History feature allows users to unlink that shared information so that it is no longer associated with their Facebook account. It is also possible to block companies so that they no longer send data to Facebook in the future. This can be for specific apps or websites, but also as a comprehensive block.

Facebook uses such information to show targeted advertisements. The social network expects that offering the privacy feature may have some impact on the company. Facebook’s advertising revenues may drop if many users use the feature to block businesses, as there will be less targeted advertising.

At the end of 2018, Facebook already told Recode that the release of the tool took longer than expected. The delay is said to be due to ‘technical challenges’. Users’ data would be stored in different places, making it difficult to find and delete. According to Facebook, browsing data was sorted by dates and time and not stored with the respective user. That made it difficult to find out which data belonged to which user.