Facebook’s Clear History privacy feature is still months from launching

You&#x27;re not surprised by this? In spite of all the talk in the article about how this was &quot;not that easy&quot; the real reason probably lies in this bit near the end:<p><i>&quot;Why can’t Facebook just stop collecting your browsing history entirely? Well, it could, but a large part of Facebook’s business depends on collecting this kind of browsing data, so it would cripple a big revenue stream.&quot;</i><p>As long as Facebook&#x27;s business model involves monetizing your data, they are going to slow walk any feature that might impact this.

&gt; &quot;Facebook currently stores browsing data by date and time, not by which user it belongs to&quot;<p>I call bull on this. I seriously doubt Facebook is collecting this browsing history and not associating it with users.

&gt; There’s a reason that Clear History isn’t called “Delete History”: Using the feature will disassociate browsing data that Facebook collects from your specific account but it won’t be erased from Facebook’s servers completely, Baser said. Instead it’s just “de-identified,” which means it’s stored by Facebook but no longer tied to the user who created it.<p>I think this is a very important part of the article. History will still exist but not tied to a particular user.

&#x27;Clear History&#x27; goes against Facebook&#x27;s business model. They will never release a genuine feature like this: the only thing user-facing will be something false only to serve PR.

I wish somebody would ask Facebook and other media companies under oath what type of other data they collect from users. A few specific examples:<p>1. Does your app collect anything on a mobile device&#x27;s clipboard and transmit this information to your servers?<p>2. Does your app send thumbnails of every image accessible from a device, even if the user hasn&#x27;t explicitly selected the image for upload?<p>I&#x27;m sure there are other examples, and perhaps device permissions prevent these in ways I&#x27;m not familiar with but it&#x27;d amaze me if companies weren&#x27;t grabbing every bit of data they could, including the above two scenarios.

Meanwhile, the D.C. attorney general sues Facebook over alleged privacy violations from Cambridge Analytica scandal [0][1].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2018&#x2F;12&#x2F;19&#x2F;dc-attorney-general-sues-facebook-over-alleged-privacy-violations-cambridge-analytica-scandal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2018&#x2F;12&#x2F;19&#x2F;dc-atto...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18717180" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18717180</a>

Figure out how much the average user brings in in revenue per month, add the option to disable all tracking for that amount per month. I don’t see what’s so hard. I’d imagine most people don’t care that much and the ones that do have an option now.

facebook recently allowed users to delete messages which was cool (i deleted a bunch of ny old wierd messages)