TechCrunch reports that people aged 13 to 35 were offered the money via gift cards if they installed an app called Facebook Research on iOS or Android. It was able to gather swathes of data by asking users to install…
TechCrunch reports that people aged 13 to 35 were offered the money via gift cards if they installed an app called Facebook Research on iOS or Android. It was able to gather swathes of data by asking users to install a custom root certificate. According to Guardian Mobile Firewall security expert Will Stafach, this included private messages and chats from apps, internet searches, emails, web browsing activity, and even location data, all of which was sent back to Facebook.
Facebook had been collecting this data through its Onavo Protect VPN service, which it acquired in 2013 for $100 million – $200 million. The company removed Onavo off the App Store last August following complaints from Apple that it violated recent data security rules, which prohibit apps from collecting data from other apps installed on a device for the purposes of analytics or advertising/marketing.
