Facebook delays release of Clear History privacy tool to later this year

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Facebook is still refining its Clear History tool and has announced it'll be coming out later this year. David Wehner, Facebook's chief financial officer, made the announcement at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. This tool is designed to let you clear information the social network collects about you from third-party apps and websites. The clamor for this feature to exist was heightened during the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal. It was supposed to be an answer to that problem, but it looks like the company is still working out its kinks. 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the tool in a Facebook note as, “In your web browser, you have a simple way to clear your cookies and history. The idea is a lot of sites need cookies to work, but you should still be able to flush your history whenever you want. We’re building a version of this for Facebook too. It will be a simple control to clear your browsing history on Facebook — what you’ve clicked on, websites you’ve visited, and so on. We’re starting with something a lot of people have asked about recently: the information we see from websites and apps that use Facebook’s ads and analytics tools.”

It isn't clear at the moment how the tool would look like and how it would work. But it'll definitely have an effect on Facebook's ability to target ads to its users, and perhaps the company is preparing for this fallout if enough users employ the tool.

Source: The Verge