The answer is elementary, my dear Watson. You can’t clear your chat history any longer. People are seriously angry about this, and rightly so. What if I am in a public place and a business contact decides to talk with me about their newest project? I may want to quickly clear any history so that no one else can see what their brilliant plan is. I’m sure there are many other reasons you would want to clear out what you’ve said, such as in the case of snooping people in your household. Sadly, though, you can’t.

As you can see in the above screen capture, there is no longer an option to “Clear History.” Additionally, your prior conversations are showing up even after both parties log out and back in. Kat and I tested the theory. She sent the same message three times – each five minutes apart. In between each message send, she logged out of the site and closed the browser completely. Yet the next time she IMd me on Facebook… up popped all previous convo.

I don’t know about you, but I definitely don’t like this at all. As I said before, this is a breach of my privacy in a way. What happened to giving us control over our information? It’s almost as though every step we take forward on this site, we leap another few back. I should be able to choose whether or not I want to save every bit of text I have exchanged with someone.

Think of it this way… what if someone gained access to your account or machine? Will they be able to then see every word written between you and your contacts? I attempted to test this. Sadly, not many people are on Facebook at this time of night – certainly no one I’ve chatted there with in the past. I’ll be curious to try tomorrow when people are browsing the site. I’ll be sure to update you then.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you feel we should be able to clear our chat history on Facebook if we wish to?