Facebook Is Nothing If Not Charming
October 5, 2020
Facebook spies on its users by collecting their personal information from hobbies, birthdays, relationships, and vacation spots. Facebook users voluntarily share this information publicly and/or privately. As a result, the company sells that information to advertisers. Facebook also spies on its competitors, but it does so in a more sophisticated way says the BBC article “Facebook Security App Used To ‘Spy’ On Competitors.”
Facebook apparently used its cross-party Onavo VPN to collect information on its competitors knowingly and in violation of anti-piracy laws. The Commons Committee discussed the incident in a report that is more than one hundred pages. Here is the gist of the report:
“The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee wrote that through the use of Onavo, which was billed as a way to give users an extra layer of security, Facebook could ‘collect app usage data from its customers to assess not only how many people had downloaded apps, but how often they used them”.
The report added:
‘This knowledge helped them to decide which companies were performing well and therefore gave them invaluable data on possible competitors. They could then acquire those companies, or shut down those they judged to be a threat.”
Even more alarming are the details about ways Facebook could shut down services it provides to its competition. Twitter’s video sharing app Vine is an example of how Facebook destroyed a competitor. Twitter wanted Vine users to find friends via their Facebook accounts, but Zuckerberg nixed that idea. Vine shuttered in 2016.
Facebook does something equally nefarious with a white list of approved apps that are allowed to use Facebook user data. Among the 5,000 approved apps are Netflix, Airbnb, and Lyft. These app companies supposedly spend $250,000 on Facebook advertising to keep their coveted position.
Zuckerburg wrote in an email:
“I think we leak info to developers, but I just can’t think of any instances where that data has leaked from developer to developer and caused a real issue for us.”
There was the Cambridge Analytica scandal where voter information was collected through a personality quiz. The data of users and their friends was stolen and it profiled 82 million Americans, then that information was sold to the Cambridge Analytica company. The United Kingdom fined Facebook 500,000 pounds and the company apologized.
It will not be the first time Facebook steals and sells user information. We wonder how their competition spies on users and sells their data.
Whitney Grace, October 5, 2020
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
