|BY NADIA HLEB|05 September, 2017|
Facebook knows what millions of people are up to on their phones… even if they don’t use social media. Or at least that’s what new info from The Wall Street Journal alleges.
Info that
Facebook extracts using this method is so accurate that it’s helped the company
make key decisions in recent years, such as buying WhatsApp and copying Snapchat’s Stories feature.
Just so you
get the idea, thanks to this method, Facebook
knows how many messages are sent every day from Snapchat, its rival.
Where does
Facebook get this data? From Onavo
Protect, a free VPN app that promises “to keep your data safe when
you go online.” Facebook bought its creators, and the app, in 2013.
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The app is
available for both Android and IOS, and has already been downloaded by an estimated 24 million users.
According to
sources that know the system behind the app, every time somebody connects to
Onavo Protect from his/her cell phone, Onavo redirects traffic to Facebook’s servers. This person’s browsing details are stored in a
database that a Facebook team later analyzes.
According to
typical terms and conditions of use, Onavo claims to “analyze information from
your cell phone data and app usage” and that it may share this
information with its “affiliates.” But
nobody reads the fine print.
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Facebook
hasn’t commented on this. However,
this method would explain how the company knew of Snapchat Stories’s big impact
long before Snapchat published the results.
Source: Softonic.com
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