Facebook announced sometime back that they will launch a tool called “Your Time on Facebook’’ which will keep tabs on the time that a user spends on Facebook. This feature which will reveal how many minutes a user has spent on Facebook’s app on that device each day for the past week on an average is soon being released. Not only that, using this tool now a user can set a daily limit and receive a reminder to stop after that many minutes each day.
The tool is just the same as it was seen in the preview but the new tool does have shortcuts to access News Feed and Friend Request settings. The new tool can be activated by going to Facebook’s More tab > Settings & Privacy > Your Time on Facebook.
We typically roll out features slowly so we can catch bugs early and resolve them quickly. We slowed the rollout of the tools after launch so our teams could fix a few bugs before we expanded globally. – Facebook spokesperson
However, this tool is not a foolproof tool which will force people to lead healthier lives outside Facebook. The “Your Time on Facebook” tool cannot tell apart passive time and active time on Facebook.
The well-being research that we’ve done . . . suggests that when people use the internet for interacting with people and building relationships, that is correlated with all the positive measures of well-being that you’d expect – like longer term health and happiness, feeling more connected and less lonely – whereas just passively consuming content is not necessarily positive on those dimensions. – Mark Zuckerberg, CEO at Facebook
This tool cannot inform a user whether that person is just mindlessly scrolling Facebook or actually interacting with another person. The tool is still in its embryonic stage and hopefully, over the time, Facebook will be able to modify this tool better to let the users know about the time they spent well on Facebook and the time they spent mindlessly scrolling through the news feed.
