Facebook's 'Clear History' tool announced at F8 2018 won't release until 2019

tech2 News StaffDec 18, 2018 12:14:38 IST

In May this year, at its annual developers' conference F8 2018, Facebook announced a 'Clear History' tool, which was aimed to offer higher privacy control by letting users completely delete their browsing history. "This feature will enable you to see the websites and apps that send us information when you use them, delete this information from your account, and turn off our ability to store it associated with your account going forward," Facebook has announced. However, almost a year later, the rollout of this tool has been further delayed to spring 2019.

Representational image. Reuters

In an interview with Recode, Facebook product management director David Baser said that the tool will be available for testing "by spring of 2019." He added that the implementation of the tool is "taking longer" than Facebook first thought. He pinned it on major technical hurdles that cropped up in development.

At a point of time Facebook is under a constant spotlight for cheating its users and leaking data of million users, the delay in the rollout of the privacy tool is unlikely to go well for Facebook. Just last weekend, Facebook had also found a bug on its platform, which leaked private photos of 6.8 million users on Facebook.

While Facebook has been trying to get away with a lot of big breaches this year with just a couple of sorries, with whatever that's gone down, Facebook needs to give its users the liberty to keep, store, download or delete their data. And that needs to be done STAT!

In case you have been contemplating deactivating or permanently deleting your Facebook account, here's how you can go about it.