Facebook postpones the option to delete the history of your activities

It has been several months since Facebook promised a feature to easily delete the history of activities on the social network. Expected initially for the current of 2018, it was postponed until spring 2019 but it will have to wait again.

All your activities on Facebook are kept in a history: publications, comments, links on which you clicked, sites visited, "liches" ... the social network keeps track of everything you do. Some apps may also access this data, which - again - is very privacy conscious. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Mark Zuckerberg announced a feature that would allow users to "delete this information and block the ability of others to access this data." A year after this announcement, the social network is still not ready for deployment.

Facebook History: the function to delete it is still not ready

In fact, it is already possible to view or delete activities from the history of Facebook. This is done from the privacy settings, but individually, that is, you can only delete the activities one by one. This is not really practical when you want to do the cleaning. It also appears that not all types of information are listed in these settings, especially applications that have access to this data.

To provide more transparency to users, Facebook has promised a function to more easily delete this history in addition to having a better visibility on the data stored. At the time of this announcement, Mark Zuckerberg compared the functionality to that to delete cookies and browsing history on web browsers.

The option had made quite a few enthusiasts, especially in the troubling context of repeated Facebook scandals. After a first postponement in the spring of 2019, Facebook Vice President of Integrity, Guy Rose, has just announced that the feature was not yet ready for immediate deployment. It will obviously be necessary to wait until at least autumn.

"We are working to completely rethink our systems and our ways of processing data to do all this in the right way (...) That's why it takes longer than expected," he explained without further Retail. However, we understand that the functionality that seems easy to implement gives rather a hard time to Facebook engineers.