Facebook’s ‘Clear History’ Tool Is, of Course, Bullshit

Tony Romm, reporting for The Washington Post:

The feature comes more than a year after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg first pledged to build a function called “Clear History” that he said would work much the same way a browser allows people to see and delete information about the sites they visited. The goal had been to empower users to “flush your history whenever you want,” he said in May 2018, admitting the company hadn’t been clear about all the ways it learns about its users.

But the implementation of those controls doesn’t exactly flush data, as Zuckerberg had promised. Instead, it disconnects information from being identified to a specific user, and it isn’t deleted outright.

Absolutely shocking. Get me to the fainting couch.

Facebook officials previously said users could “delete this information from your account,” a pledge that might have led users to believe Facebook would remove it entirely.

Who would have thought “delete” meant “delete”?

★ Monday, 26 August 2019