Facebook to allow users to clear browsing history: Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg made the announcement at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference in San Jose, California.
Facebook Inc Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday said the company is working on a feature that allows users to clear their browsing history from the site and prevent it from keeping tabs on link clicks going forward.
Zuckerberg warned that the service won’t be quite as good if users take this step, as it has to relearn their history. But he added the goal is to put more power into its users’ hands to determine what they want to share.
Zuckerberg made the announcement at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference, in which he acknowledging that 2018 has been an “intense year” just four months in.
Facebook is holding its annual conference in San Jose, California, in the wake of a year of controversies over fake news, privacy violations, congressional testimony, Russia investigations, and consequent apologies.
Facing the startups, software developers and other tech folks who are normally some of Facebook’s biggest fans, Zuckerberg will have a chance both to apologize again for the company’s missteps - and to talk about where things go from here.
If his recent statements are any indication, Zuckerberg will probably mention that Facebook must take a “broader view” of its responsibility in the world, emphasize the value of the Facebook “community” and hint that Facebook’s efforts to fix things will be good for everyone - users, developers, Facebook itself, and even the world.
The F8 developer conference comes six weeks since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, revealing that the political data-mining firm inappropriately accessed the information of as many as 87 million Facebook users. Facebook has been doing damage control ever since.
For Zuckerberg, that’s meant repeated apologies to users and lawmakers, two days of congressional questioning about whether and how the company protects its users’ privacy.