How to disable the link history feature in the Facebook app

Earlier this year, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) introduced a feature that makes it easier to find links that users interacted with within the Facebook app on smartphones. It seems like a new way for the company to continue collecting data as technology and privacy laws tighten the grip on these practices. This feature is called “Link History” and its concept is simply to review the list of links you click on within the app. If you think this is useful and great, you are right, but at the same time, you are also wrong, because this service does not come for free, even though it may seem so superficially, but it comes at the cost of something that affects each one of us; privacy! Let’s explain more through the following lines.

The Facebook app is filled with many external links. Each time you click on one of these links, you are redirected to the website or the thing you clicked on. You might enter a website and find it useful, but as soon as you exit and scroll through the Facebook page to update its content, you may find that the website link has disappeared. Or perhaps you want to go back to that web page again but you don’t remember the name of the page that shared the link. To solve this problem, Meta developed this new feature that stores external website links you opened from within Facebook over the past 30 days, making it easier for you to return to them in case of loss. It is similar to the history page in browsers like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, and others.

In a pop-up window encouraging users to
agree to the new tracking method, Meta says: With the new
option, you will never lose any link again. This refers to
the fact that it uses the information [links you clicked on] to improve
advertising across its products.

As of writing this article, the new Link History feature from Meta is not a default feature that works on its own. Users need to activate it voluntarily, and you dear readers need to pay attention to that, as enabling Link History on Facebook gives Meta the parent company the
authority to monitor and track external websites you visited through the Facebook app in the last 30 days. Information like this is valuable for Meta because it uses it to target customized ads to you across its various apps and services, including Instagram and Threads app, thus increasing its profits. Fortunately – so far – external sites visited through the Messenger app, and the web version of Facebook as well, are not stored by Meta, or at least that’s what we know!

Perhaps, but to be certain, open the Facebook app and click the menu button (☰) on the bottom bar (on iPhone) or top bar (on Android), then scroll down and click on “Settings & Privacy”, then click on “Link History”. If you see a screen prompting you to “Allow Link History”, do not do so and exit the page. If you find a list of website links you visited through the app, this means the feature is activated, and that leads us to how to disable it.

If the second scenario is what happened, it is advisable to disable this feature immediately to protect your privacy as much as possible. Unfortunately, you cannot disable the Link History feature through the same steps used for activation, instead, you will need to enter the settings of the built-in browser within the Facebook app. It’s simple, just click on the menu button (☰) after opening the app, then go to “Settings & Privacy”, then click on “Settings”, then click on “Browser” under “Preferences”. Below the “Browsing data” section, you will find a toggle to disable the Link History feature named “Allow link history”, disable it, and confirm by clicking on “Don’t allow” when prompted.

By the way, on the same page to disable the mentioned feature, you will find an option “Clear” next to “Link history” to delete the link history, click on it only if you want to continue enabling this feature; just know that Meta, and other companies, take advantage of these opportunities to track us and obtain our basic information to make huge profits behind us. Some see the Link History feature and its counterparts as useful because they help companies customize preferred advertisements in front of us, while others see that this should not happen because it is a clear violation of privacy. You choose according to your beliefs.