This is the main point the article is making:
> The only thing you’re clearing is a connection Facebook made between its data and the data it gets from third parties, not the data itself.
However this is not the main privacy issue with Facebook in my opinion. Even if Facebook users could legitimately clear their third party data entirely, they still can't easily clear their own first party data (posts, photos, searches, likes, Instagram activity, etc). Right now, you have to go click "delete" in your activity log one-by-one on individual posts. This is so time consuming and manual that most users will never do it - which is of course by design.
There is a plugin that helped users delete their Facebook content (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...), by letting you select the time period and type of content you want to delete. However, Facebook repeatedly breaks it by changing the page design for seemingly no real reason. The cat and mouse updates worked for a while but this extension has not been updated since 2019. Some creative people then built a second extension that switches Facebook to an older layout (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/switch-to-classic-...) and this allowed the above history clearing extension to work. But then Facebook made an even more drastic redesign of the Activity Log, which broke this approach of using a second extension in conjunction with the first.
Can any enterprising HN code ninja help solve this problem? I think we need a suite of tools to help users easily clear their history from all social media platform, whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever. Ideally we'd have a law requiring such controls be provided to users but I'm not holding my breath.