It feels like Orwellian level double-speak to market an app that is designed to allow Facebook to monitor at your mobile traffic as "protecting" your phone and "securing" your connection.
They say a good salesman can sell ice to an eskimo. Well, today we found out a great marketing person can sell spyware as security software.
>This past fall, Facebook snatched up the teen compliment app tbh, and quickly integrated a similar Q&A feature into its social network soon after. This all took place before Tbh had truly established itself as a new social network. It wasn’t clear at the time if it was the next big thing, or just a flash in the pan. (It appears to have been the latter.) Onavo’s insights into Tbh’s fast rise and heavy engagement likely gave Facebook a heads-up.
>it’s not likely that all Onavo users understand they’re actually feeding Facebook the information that allows it to take on any challenger to its social networking empire.
I wonder if it's be possible to make a social networking startup, optimise solely for Onavo metrics, and get bought out by Facebook.
VPN has always been marketed as a silver bullet that protects you from all the evil that exists on the Internet. Only if people were little more aware about how it works, they'd not fall prey to such tricks.
That said, as we discuss this of HN, there will be millions out there falling prey to FB.
I hate this trend. I think all the major messenger apps do this now, it was an awful surprise in LINE. The yelp app is basically unusable now for researching new restaurants since they go so far as to prevent people from popping out into a real browser, and now the Gmail app attempts to lock you in now too.
I hate it too. Mainly because my behavior - especially on Yelp - is to open multiple restaurants in tabs in my browser. Even on mobile. Then I can compare the ones I like.
This is impossible within their tabless "embedded" browser. So I end up using my laptop.
Yelp has one of the worst and most spiteful mobile websites, too. Most of the features are removed, you’re limited to a handful of pictures and I don’t think you can even read all the reviews. It’s enough to make me not want to use them at all.
Some apps in WhatsApp stay within WhatsApp as well. For example Marktplaats, the Dutch counterpart for Ebay/ Craigslist doesn't leave WhatsApp but gets opened within. Nice for them to be able to view what I'm looking for.
This seems to greatly improve battery life too, at least for me. Did this for Twitter too. Even with background turned off, I would see them using background battery before
How does something like this interact with the GDPR? Like Art 5, 1b, "collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes" - I'm not sure that "analysing VPN traffic to find out what apps people are using" qualifies.
Or even Art 5, 1c, "adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed".
Art 9, 1, "Processing of personal data revealing [anything uniquely personal] shall be prohibited." Knowing that someone is launching Grindr, for example, is a partial clue to their sexual identity. etc.etc.
They bought a service marketed as a privacy protection tool in order to monitor the traffic of its (largely unsuspecting) users, so they can know which startups to buy to prevent any competition or innovation.
Perhaps Facebook doesn't mind appearing blatantly creepy and evil, and is happy to continue to live off the unbothered and ignorant users, a la the Nigerian prince scams[0]?
It's not about what Facebook is doing, it's about how it's perceived. Many blame Facebook for the Brexit/Trump/ultra-right rise and see any step of the social media giant as evil. You know how they say...if a man connects lives of a billion people and fucks up one democracy, they don't call him a visionary, they call him evil.
Indeed, there is a lot more in brexit/trump story, but not everything causes the Congressional Hearing on the foreign hostile state meddling in the 2016 election.
It's not really them releasing one, they bought one that was established and then just started siphoning user data. For a long time there was no obvious link in the App Store from Onavo to Facebook.
They say a good salesman can sell ice to an eskimo. Well, today we found out a great marketing person can sell spyware as security software.