Facebook Knows What You Did ‘On This Day’ Five Years Ago
From time to time, Facebook enjoys throwing out a new feature that keeps the social networking giant relative and fresh. A few times, Facebook has offered viewers an opportunity to put together a year in review type video. On its anniversary, Facebook put together videos for their users that utilized pictures and events from users’ entire membership run with the social network platform.
And now, Facebook has done it again.
With “On This Day,” Facebook will look back in time and see what you were doing last year, or five years ago, and remind you – and your friends – of what happened to you at some point in the past… whether you want to look back or not.
On This Day has taken years of testing to work properly, but now Facebook says that it’s glitch-free and ready to roll. Launched yesterday, the On This Day feature looks back into your personal Facebook history and tries to find an event from your life, whether it be an anniversary or a birthday or the like. Facebook assures everyone that the algorithm for the On This Day feature won’t zero in on troubling or offensive anniversaries like the death of a friend or loved one. (This is particularly notable after the Year in Review feature that Facebook let loose a few months ago, a feature that unwittingly brought up some negative memories for certain users.)
You cannot, at the moment, opt out of the On This Day feature. If you’re a user of Facebook, it’s already working on your account. If you haven’t seen anything from it yet, it simply means that nothing of import really happened on this particular day in your personal Facebook history. But it’s there. And it will remind you of your past the first chance it gets.
One thing about the On This Day feature that might upset Facebook users is that it won’t only remind you of special events that you’ve posted about, it will also remind you on the anniversary of certain photos that you’ve been tagged in. Perhaps you had a particularly rough evening at a party somewhere and someone took a picture of you and put it on Facebook. Congratulations! Now Facebook’s On This Day feature will remind you of that every year. The good news is that you can delete the On This Day post from your News Feed as soon as you see it. The bad news is that you even have to worry about it in the first place.
Been on twitter 4ages Facebook ‘On This Day’: new feat. takes on Timehop with automated… – http://t.co/sJXYxfs2p1 via http://t.co/GghFaWaklA
— BIG CAKES (@bigCAKES) March 25, 2015
[Image via Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]
