Facebook's Clear History Privacy Tool Begins to Be Deployed in Three Countries

Nearly a year and a half ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced at the annual conference of business developers that users would start letting users break the connection between their history web browsers and their Facebook accounts. After months of delay, Facebook's Clear History is deploying in Ireland, South Korea and Spain. Other countries will follow "in the coming months," the company said. The new tool, designed by Facebook following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, is designed to give users more control over the privacy of their data to the detriment of advertisers' targeting capabilities.

When it arrives in your country, the Clear History tool will be part of a new section of the service titled "Off Facebook Activity". When you open it, you will see the applications and websites that track your activity and send reports. Return to Facebook for advertising targeting purposes. Tap the "Clear History" button to unlink this information from your Facebook account.

You can also choose to prevent companies from forwarding to Facebook their tracking data about you. You will have the choice to disconnect any off Facebook navigation data or specific application and website data. Facebook says the product is slowly rolling out "to help ensure that it works reliably for everyone."

The company warned that users would likely see apps and websites not recognized by their account. "For example, a website that you have not visited may appear because a friend has viewed it on your phone," the company said. "Or because you share a computer at home with your partner and your children."

The Clear History tool was originally scheduled to launch last year. But as my former colleague Kurt Wagner reported to recoding, Facebook has encountered a number of unexpected delays. Here's a part of his interview with David Baser, Privacy Products Manager:

Baser attributed the delay to two technical challenges, both related to how Facebook stores user data on its servers.

1. Facebook data is not always stored the same way it is collected. When Facebook collects web browsing data, for example, this dataset includes several items, such as your personal credentials, the website you visited, and the timestamp of the collection of data. data.

Sometimes these data are separated and stored in different parts of the Facebook system. Finding them all to be able to clean them up, especially once they have been separated, has been a challenge, Baser said.

2. Facebook currently saves navigation data by date and time and not by user. This means that there was no easy way in the Facebook system to see all navigation data related to an individual user. Facebook had to create a new system that stored the classified navigation data at the user level. "It was not very simple, in fact, in practice for us to build," Baser said. This is important, however, because for users to be able to enter and erase this data, they must be able to retrieve it.

"Off-Facebook Activity being a new type of tool, there was no template to follow," said Facebook in a blog today. "Our engineering teams have redesigned our systems and built a new way of handling information. We also conducted research for months to gather input from individuals, privacy advocates, policy makers, advertisers and industry groups. We made significant changes in response to what we learned. "

Facebook plans to continue to create similar tools to try to reorient society in terms of privacy, said the blog.