If you don’t feel well with Facebook analysing your every move in web, this might be very disturbing for you.
Since 2016, Facebook has been running research program in which they offered users in ages from 13 up to 35 small, monthly payments for using their software. The whole idea was that the user gave full access to their phone data, which then facebook could gather, analyse and use. The app, literally called “Research” used for this purpose, was recently removed from the App Store by apple due to the fact that it violated their policy by getting root access to network traffic.
Tim Cook has repeatedly criticised Facebook for their data collection practices and breaking AppStore rules might be worsening his opinion.
The system was administered by beta testing systems such as Applause, BetaBound and uTest in order to hide any connections to Facebook, the whole project was given a fitting name – “Atlas”, rather highlighting that Zuckerberg and crew tried to map trends among users worldwide.
Will Strafach, Guardian Mobile Firewall’s security expert, was asked to do some research on the “Research”, after all he reported “If Facebook makes full use of the level of access they are given by asking users to install the Certificate, they will have the ability to continuously collect the following types of data: private messages in social media apps, chats from in instant messaging apps – including photos/videos sent to others, emails, web searches, web browsing activity, and even ongoing location information by tapping into the feeds of any location tracking apps you may have installed.” Basically, if you install the app and give it permission to use your data, it will collect anything that goes out or in your phone.
This shows how far the tech giant is willing to go for data collection, the direction in which it’s going might even scare some of us, even so big and trusted companies like facebook violate policies and go beyond ethics.
It is a good thing to monitor what data from online activities are collected. Violating our privacy is not a crime yet violating world’s biggest social media is? Well… I can’t say I’m surprised. But they at least should be fair towards their users..
Doing market research and gathering large amounts of data on people is beneficial in many areas. However, at this point I am not even surprised at what Facebook did. Similar practices have been going on for a long time, and I don’t whether to be shocked anymore. This is definitely violating privacy, but I also think that nowadays social media cannot be trusted. We never know who is monitoring us, so at this stage it is better to filter what we post and simply be prepared.