Since 2016, Facebook has been offering to pay individuals as young as 13 to install a Facebook Research app on their phone. The app is actually a VPN allowing Facebook root access to network traffic and analyzes any and all phone activity.
Just how evil is Facebook? I think the answer to that question is «we don’t know yet.» I’m sure many thought it couldn’t get any worse than the Cambridge Analytica debacle, but then documents appeared recently detailing how the social network made money off children. Now we find out Facebook has been paying children as young as 13 to install a VPN and give the social network full access to their phone data.
As TechCrunch reports, in 2016 Facebook started offering to pay users aged between 13 and 35 as much as $20 per month plus referral fees to install an app. That app is referred to internally as Project Atlas, but offered to iOS and Android users as «Facebook Research.» Under the hood, the app is actually a VPN that gains root access to a device and then is able to decrypt and analyze all traffic.
An analysis of the app by Will Strafach of Guardian Mobile Firewall concluded that it allows Facebook 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.
