At F8 developer conference last year, Facebook first announce about Clear History Option, and now after a year passed this option is finally going to live on Facebook. A recent Facebook Newsroom post verifies this information that initially Facebook going to roll out Clear History in Ireland, South Korea, and Spain. However, after these countries, Facebook going to launch this option globally.
Clear History option going to sit inside Off-Facebook Activity Option which you can find in the settings page. To Understand the function of Clear History option you first need to know about Off-Facebook Activity Option.
What is Off-Facebook Activity Option?
Off-Facebook Activity option gathers information about businesses and Organization that shares user’s information with Facebook. Businesses and Organization collect your information via Facebook Pixel and Facebook Login, which they have integrated into their website or app backend. Once they collect information about you, they sell that information to Facebook. Facebook, on the other hand, uses this information to show targeted ads to the user.
How Facebook Shows Us Targeted Ads?
Now, one thing you might be thinking of, How Facebook uses this information to show targeted ads? To understand it in layman terms, let me take an example. Suppose you are visiting an e-commerce website via your Smartphone to see a Book. Now, the e-commerce website you are visiting has integrated Facebook Pixel in the backend. What Facebook Pixel do is collect your Smartphone Name, and the book name you visit. Now, the e-commerce website sells this data to Facebook. Facebook, on the other hand, again shows the user the ad about the same book he saw on the e-commerce website. That’s how Facebook able to show you the Targeted Ads.
Now, Coming to Clear History option, it gives the user the facility to remove all the off-site data Facebook collects about the user from other websites. Like the e-commerce one, I have explained in the example.
How to stop Facebook to Show you Targeted Ads?
With Clear History, you can either clear all the data or some of them that is collected by a particular website. Clear History also gives you an option called Future Off-Facebook Activity. If you turn on this option you restrict Facebook to collect data about you from other websites.
Note: Turning ON Future Off-Facebook Activity or Clearing all off site Facebook data doesn’t mean that Facebook going to stop show you the ad. You know that Facebook is a free to use website and it is freely available to everyone because it generates revenue from the ads. Clearing Off site Facebook Data or Turning ON Future Off-Facebook Activity only blocks Facebook to not show you the targeted ad.
