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

Turn and move the Facebook is involved in polemics about the data usage of its users; but, as many of you may recall, earlier this year one of these problems also Apple.

To remind you: last January Apple banned the app Facebook Research (successor to Onavo) after finding that Mark Zuckerberg's social network circumvented Ma's application distribution rules.

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

As you can imagine, this made Facebook a mess of those, and at the request of US Senator Richard Blumenthal, the social network had to provide the numbers of the data collection operation (also known as the “Atlas Project”) that the company had armed. These data were also obtained by the TechCrunch.

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

A Facebook spokesman said that not all data collected was for 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 have eliminated all market information from users 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, Ma admitted that she did not know how many devices were running the search application, which was distributed using corporate certificates (profiles) using VPN technology.

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

One day after the complaint against Facebook surfaced, it turned out that the Google It also circumvented Ma's rules for installing a data collection profile on user devices.

After these scandals, Apple said that today, both Facebook and Google "comply" with its rules. We'll see how soon