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Facebook closes its controversial Onavo VPN application and will end its practice of conducting unpaid market research programs, TechCrunch reports. Although paid research studies will continue in other ways, the company said it would ensure that users explicitly understand their implications for privacy. The Android version of the Onavo application has now been removed from the Play Store, but will remain functional for existing users for a short while.
Onavo was responsible for collecting important data for Facebook. The VPN application has been presented as a way to limit the use of data in the background and to offer "a secure VPN for your personal information." It also collected information about how much time users spend using various apps, mobile data, and Wi-Fi. Usage by app, device and country information, and other information about visited websites.
according to buzzfeed It's this app that gave Facebook the data needed to understand the popularity of the competing WhatsApp service. After seeing the number of messages people were sending via WhatsApp, the company better understood the threat that it represented for Facebook Messenger and later acquired it for $ 16 billion.
The controversy around Onavo erupted last year when Facebook was forced to remove the application from the iOS App Store after Apple violated the rules regarding collection. of data. However, the service code resided in the Facebook search application, which paid teens up to $ 20 a month to access all their phone activity data.
After publishing the details of the Facebook Research application, Apple has also removed it from its App Store. This time, the iPhone maker challenged the way Facebook had distributed the app using enterprise developer certificates for internal employee phones. Apple then prevented all of Facebook's internal iOS applications from running for a short period of time. For now, the Facebook search application is still running on Android. It does not accept more participants, although TechCrunch notes that existing studies will continue.
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