Facebook never delivered its "Clear History" feature

A year ago, Facebook -- wracked by the Cambridge Analytica scandal (and many, many others) -- promised a "Clear History" feature that would allow its users to wipe clean the nonconsensual dossiers that the company had compiled on them, a promise uttered by Mark Zuckerberg himself during the F8 developer conference.

A year has gone by, F8 is here again, and Clear History is nowhere to be found. The company says it will roll it out in 2019. But who knows? Remember, Facebook has also promised a suite of privacy-oriented services without providing any schedule for their delivery.

Philip Michael from Tom's Guide points out that there's really only one way for Facebook to demonstrate that it is taking privacy seriously, and that would be for Mark Zuckerberg to step down. After all, Zuck has spent literally his entire tenure at the helm of Facebook making and then egregiously breaking privacy policies, then mouthing hollow apologies, making new promises, and then breaking them.

I don't think that Zuck's departure would be enough. Mark Zuckerberg didn't personally design and implement all of the invasive tools that have produced scandal after scandal (though he may have signed off on all or at least most of them). He had a literal army of managers, product designers and engineers who built those systems in full knowledge of what they were doing. Changing the guy in the CEO's office without changing out the rest of those complicit people will have no meaningful effect on the company. Read the rest