Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed i…
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Since 2016, Facebook has been paying users ages 13 to 35 up to $20 per month plus referral fees to sell their privacy by installing the iOS or Android “Facebook Research” app. Facebook even asked users to screenshot their Amazon order history page. The program is administered through beta testing services Applause, BetaBound and uTest to cloak Facebook’s involvement, and is referred to in some documentation as “Project Atlas” — a fitting name for Facebook’s effort to map new trends and rivals around the globe.
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I figured we’d been almost a day since Facebook were last in the news for privacy and ethics-related concerns (earlier this week, earlier still), so we must’ve been due more coverage. This time, it’s about Facebook’s latest tack in trying to understand the teen market that it’s failing to penetrate as well as it once did, and the fact that it’s been paying young adults and children to proxy all of their traffic through Facebook’s servers including setting up their phones to allow Facebook to break their encryption so that it can understand how they’re using them.
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