Facebook conveniently ignores Clear History feature at F8 keynote

Image:  Justin Sullivan  / Getty 

This time, we really should know better. 

Mark Zuckerberg teed up his F8 keynote on Tuesday with a promise that Facebook has, finally, got the message. “The future is private,” he told the crowd gathered at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. Going forward he insisted his company would work hard to build “a privacy-focused social platform.” If only we hadn’t heard it all before. 

Cast your mind back to May 1, 2018. The annual Facebook F8 developer conference was once again in full swing, the Cambridge Analytica scandal showed no sign of abating, and Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan promised that a new tool called Clear History would be built in a “few months.” It’s no spoiler to say that we’re still waiting.  

Billed as a way to “see the websites and apps that send [Facebook] information when you use them, [and] delete this information from your account,” Clear History appeared to be both a concession from the company and sign that it finally took user concerns at least somewhat seriously. However, as BuzzFeed News reported in February of this year, the entire feature was simply a hastily thrown together PR play. 

Image: Amy Osborne / AFP / getty

“If you watch the presentation, we really had nothing to show anyone,” a source BuzzFeed News describes as “close to F8” told the publication. “Mark just wanted to score some points.”

As the last we’ve heard Clear History is still months away (if we ever actually even see it), it’s safe to say that Facebook was making empty promises from the stage of its biggest annual event. The fact that the feature wasn’t mentioned a single time in today’s F8 keynote reinforces that conclusion. 

Speaking of which, Zuckerberg took time today to make numerous claims regarding the company’s future privacy-focused efforts. He was, however, extremely vague on the timing. Would they be built in a few months? A year? Never?

A Facebook post from the CEO following his speech was equally light on specifics. 

“For the last 15 years, we’ve built Facebook and Instagram into digital equivalents of the town square, where you can interact with lots of people at once,” wrote Zuckerberg. “Now we’re focused on building the digital equivalent of the living room, where you can interact in all the ways you’d want privately — from messaging and stories to secure payments and more.”

We’ll believe it when we see it.