Facebook is launching a massive update for it’s platform which will enable users to opt out of Facebook’s browser history collection practice, which helps the company to target ads based on user history. The company collects the browser data for various reasons but mainly the company uses it for targeting users on their interests. The CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday the users can opt out of data collection for the first time in the history of the platform.
The feature is going to be called “clear history”- by taking advantage of this feature users can also delete data already collected by the company. Your browsing data will still be retained in an anonymous state for third-party companies. If you choose to simply delete the full data it won’t be deleted instantaneously and it will take some time for the company to completely delete the data, but it will be a much shorter amount of time that the company currently holds onto that data, which is 90 days.
The company is getting ready to follow the GDPR data regulations which directly impacts the social giant. There is also a limitation on the amount of data that is to be collected on a user. The changes announced by Facebook will limit data to the developers. Zuckerberg announced the “Clear History” feature onstage at Facebooks annual developer conference, F8, on Tuesday morning.
Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook prior to the announcement that this was to give users the control Facebook wants them to have and what privacy advocates had been asking for, but also included a warning;
‘To be clear, when you clear your cookies in your browser, it can make parts of your experience worse. You may have to sign back in to every website, and you may have to reconfigure things. The same will be true here. Your Facebook won’t be as good while it relearns your preferences”.
He also commented on his recent experience testifying in Congress admitting what most people have commented about the event in that he ‘didn’t have clear enough answers to some of the questions about data’.
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