Facebook ‘Clear History’—Doesn’t; LinkedIn Has Blocked 21.6 Million Fakes This Year; YouTube Concedes Robot Fight Videos Aren’t Animal Cruelty; Amazon Doubling Presence in Portland

At F8 2018, Facebook made a big deal about a plan to let users remove browsing data from the platform. It’s now rolling out…at least in Spain, Ireland, and South Korea. Mashable.com reports that the rub is…’Clear History’ doesn’t actually clear anything. It just ‘disconnects’ users from your data. Your data continues to live on Facebook servers. The social network whines that it would be too time-consuming and possibly unreliable to remove it! You will be able to opt to disconnect your future browsing from your account…although this won’t stop Facebook from collecting data about your activity in the first place! I, for one, am resigned to our Facebook overlords knowing what I’m going to do before I even think of it. Gah!

We just reported on Twitter killing a substantial number of accounts controlled by the Chinese government, aiming to disrupt the Hong Kong Protests. Well, LinkedIn has been busy this year, blocking 21.6 million fake accounts the first half of 2019! According to geekwire.com, the vast majority….19.5 million…were blocked at the registration stage, and never even went live on the network. They spotted and nuked another 2 million, with 67,000 accounts flagged by users and then killed off by LinkedIn. One thing that has kept the Microsoft owned platform out of the hornet’s nest of fake news and politics is pointed out by Editor in Chief Dan Roth. He notes that “You talk on LinkedIn the same way you talk in the office.” “There are certain boundaries around what is acceptable.”

YouTube has relented and apologized after taking down robot fight videos, claiming originally that they violated YouTube’s policy against “deliberate infliction of animal suffering” such as “dog fighting and cock fighting.” Gizmodo.com says the 9 videos that were pulled down are once again online. You have to give YouTube a little credit…a spokesperson told Motherboard “With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call.”

Amazon is beefing up its operation in Portland, Ore., with 400 people being added to their staff there. Geekwire.com reports that Amazon is moving into a new 84,000 square foot office there. Amazon plans to double its Portland workforce with the move to the new space. The roles are in operations, software engineering, product management, as well as other tech fields. Portland is the tech hub for Amazon Web Services, the company’s giant cloud division.