Facebook has been making headlines for data-privacy breaches for quite some time now. The social-media giant received massive backlash because of the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal where it was accused of selling user data to a third party company. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified for the same before the United States Congress. This immoral practice of data-privacy breach did not stop there as Facebook was accused of unethical and illegal data collection by multiple reports, bringing COO Sheryl Sandberg under fire.
Nevertheless, Facebook does not seem to have learned the lesson in 2018. With 2019 just beginning, Facebook is accused of gaining near total access to the data on smartphones of volunteers (aged between 13 to 35 years) in exchange for $20 gift cards. Facebook has admitted to paying teenagers up to $20 a month to install an app called ‘Facebook Research’ on both iOS and Android. As a part of the company’s Project Atlas initiative, the app would decrypt and analyze user’s phone activity and even ask them to screenshot their Amazon order history page.
In response, Apple has blocked the app on iOS as well as other Facebook apps that the company uses for beta testing and internal affairs. Facebook has agreed to shit down the app acknowledging that it violates Apple’s developer guidelines. The app, however, is still running on Android.
According to a report by The Verge, the app is no longer available on iOS. Nevertheless, it will continue to exist on Android.
The Verge notes that the Facebook Research app requires users to install a custom root certificate on their smartphones, which in turn help Facebook to view user’s private messages, emails, web searches, and even browsing history.
Notwithstanding, Facebook might be looking forward to changing their ways of handling data privacy concerns. The company has admitted that it has hired three veteran privacy law activists including Nate Cardozo, an attorney formerly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who has been publicly critical about the company for quite some time.
In 2015, Cardozo once wrote in an op-ed that Facebook’s “business model depends on our collective confusion and apathy about privacy.”
Additionally, Facebook also hired attorney Robyn Greene, formerly with the Open Technology Institute in Washington, DC, and Nathan White, who is set to leave his position at Access Now.
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