Apple’s banned Facebook app collected data from more than 187,000 users

Apple's banned Facebook app collected data from more than 187,000 users

Turn and move, the Facebook is involved in controversies about the use of its users’ data; but, as many of you may remember, earlier this year one of these problems also encompassed the Apple.

To remind you: last January, Apple banned the app Facebook Research (successor to Onavo) after realizing that Mark Zuckerberg’s social network circumvented the application distribution rules established by Apple.

After realizing that Facebook paid for users (mostly young) to use the service, the TechCrunch denounced the giant of Menlo Park, since the purpose of the platform was to collect personal data.

As you can imagine, this gave Facebook a lot of trouble, and at the request of United States Senator Richard Blumenthal, the social network had to provide the figures for the data collection operation (also known as “Project Atlas”) that the company had armed. These data were also obtained by TechCrunch.

According to the information sent to the American justice, the Facebook Research platform collected data from 187 thousand users worldwide – about 31,000 in the US and another 156,000 in India. Among the participants who had their data purchased, are about 34 thousand teenagers.

A Facebook spokesman said that not all of the data collected served a purpose, and that the company often received information that was not «requested».

We did not review all data to determine whether it contained health or financial data. We eliminate all user market information that was collected by the Facebook Research app, which would include any financial or health data that may have existed.

Apple commented on the issue in a letter sent to US lawmakers last March; at the time, Apple admitted that it did not know how many devices were running the search application, which was distributed using corporate certificates (profiles) that used VPN technology.

We know that the profile that supplied the Facebook Research application was created on April 19, 2017, but this is not necessarily related to the date when Facebook distributed it to end users.

The day after the complaint against Facebook surfaced, it was discovered that the Google it also circumvented Apple’s rules for installing a data collection profile on users’ devices.

After these scandals, Apple said that currently both Facebook and Google «are in compliance» with their rules. We’ll see how long …