Do you click on a link from Facebook? Then Facebook will be happy to register it for you for thirty days.

Facebook is currently in full swing LinkHistory Roll out. The feature has not been officially announced, but Gizmodo noticed it through a pop-up that appeared in the mobile application. In Link History, Facebook keeps an overview of all the links you have clicked in the Facebook app in the last thirty days. According to Facebook, this is a useful addition because you will “never lose a link again.”

Interesting for Facebook

The party for which Link History is primarily of interest is, of course, Facebook itself. It has been no secret for years that the social media giant’s revenue model is based on user data that it can sell to advertisers. The phaseout of third-party cookies in browsers and stricter privacy laws in Europe are making it harder for Facebook to collect this valuable data. Link history allows Facebook to share data about your internet activity with advertisers because you have given it explicit permission to track you when you leave the app.

The parent company Meta imposes some restrictions on itself. This gives you the option to disable link history. In this case, Facebook specifically promises not to store any links from you and for those who sign up, their history will be deleted after thirty days. Link history is also limited to the mobile application and links that contacts share with you via Messenger are left out.

False sense of control

Nevertheless, legitimate questions are raised about the introduction of link history. The so-called controls that Facebook grants users to determine how far tracking can go are described by critical voices as fictitious controls. Link history is set by default, so you must indicate that you do not want to be tracked. The promise that your history will be deleted after thirty days is also ambiguous: Gizmodo notes that links can be stored on Meta’s servers for up to ninety days.

The only “improvement” that Link History offers in terms of privacy is that Meta has now at least informed you that your clicking behavior is being recorded, rather than secretly leaving cookies that track everything you do outside of Facebook . In addition, Meta has many other tricks up its sleeve to collect data about you if you don’t want to participate. The “meta pixel,” for example, allows the company to collect data about you even if you don’t even have a Facebook or Instagram account.

Link history is still being rolled out and we haven’t seen a pop-up for our account yet. We would also consider it a major penalty if Facebook could enforce this system in the European Union. Meta made a notable move in 2023 by launching (for a fee) a version of Facebook without ads.