Facebook will give users the opportunity to clean their history

Source: Vedomosti

The Facebook company announced that in a few months its users will have the opportunity to delete some data from their history. First of all, these are transitions from the social network to other sites, as well as geolocation marks and information on the use of third-party applications.

The function was called "Clean History", its creation was announced by the company's financial director, David Vener. “New data privacy requirements are one of the main external factors that work against Facebook in 2019. This is one of the reasons for the possible reduction in the company's advertising revenue growth this year,” he said .

Vener also added that enhancing privacy will prevent Facebook from displaying advertisements according to user preferences as effectively as before. He believes that the situation after “tightening the screws” with privacy is becoming more complex and less clear to the social network.
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Previously, Facebook has repeatedly been accused of providing user data to third-party companies without the permission of the owners of this information. Since the social network itself is completely free for its users, it earns on advertising. Well, since Internet users place a large amount of data about themselves, we can say that the social network knows all about them or at least a lot.

In particular, data are stored not only about gender, age, education, place of residence, family, but also about the content of records and the reaction to other people's posts. Moreover, the social network collects information about which links attract the user and in which external applications people register using Facebook. These informational “treasures” are transferred to commercial companies, although the social network assures that the data is impersonal.

Business needs all this in order to better understand what kind of goods or services to offer to a particular user.

Facebook is doing well financially. In particular, in the fourth quarter of 2018, social network revenues amounted to $ 16.9 billion, which is 30% more than in the same period of 2017.

As for the new feature, its Facebook promised to launch in May last year. The founder of the social network, Mark Zuckerberg, then compared it with clearing the history in the browser. The entrepreneur said that users will get the tools to simply control their actions inside Facebook - to which sites they made the transition, to which links they clicked.

Users can not only see what data the user interacts with external applications and links are stored by the social network, you can delete everything that the user considers necessary. True, Zuckerberg warned that after deleting the data, the social network will become less interesting and useful to the user, because the social network will again have to adapt to the interests of a particular user.

As far as can be judged, Facebook decided to “purge” not by its own will, but after a series of scandals with access to the personal data of its users. One of the latest conflicts with Cabridge Analytica became known in early 2018. It turned out that the company from 2015, without the permission of users, collected their personal data to develop an algorithm for analyzing political preferences of voters.

We are talking about personal data of more than 85 million users. Facebook executives had to talk not only with the users themselves, but also with US officials and congressmen. The creator of the social network was even invited to the US Congress, where for several hours they were not asking the most convenient questions for the company and its business. No sanctions followed, but the management understood the signal of the officials.

Soon after, the company allowed users to remove personal information from their account, restrict access to personal data to third parties, including the management of the social network, or even forbid the resource to display personalized ads based on criteria such as gender, religious or political preferences.