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Facebook Buys Israeli Mobile Analytics Startup Onavo

rtoz writes "Israeli Mobile Data Management Startup "Onavo" has announced that it has been acquired by Social Media Giant Facebook. Facebook will get its first office at Israel by acquiring Onavo. Techcrunch has mentioned that Onavo will give facebook a much deeper tech bench to measure how its mobile services are working. 'Onavo will be an exciting addition to Facebook,' a Facebook spokesperson told AllThingsD. 'We expect Onavo's data compression technology to play a central role in our mission to connect more people to the internet, and their analytic tools will help us provide better, more efficient mobile products.'"

19 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Onavo app by mwvdlee · · Score: 1

    I love the Onavo app for my Android.
    Is there any good app that can replace it?

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    1. Re:Onavo app by SimonTheSoundMan · · Score: 1

      Used to use on it iOS, until it routed all data through an insecure VPN.

    2. Re:Onavo app by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Eh. So you are loving a spyware app that you downloaded and installed yourself? And now you are asking for a good replacement?
      Sorry, I don't follow.

    3. Re:Onavo app by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      Wait, I don't follow politics daily: Who is the "bad" guys du jour in the middle east currently?

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      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    4. Re:Onavo app by citizenr · · Score: 2, Insightful

      They ARE the bad guys.

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      Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
    5. Re:Onavo app by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You mean Palestinian women and children you consider to be "bad guys" because you starve them until they break the rules?

    6. Re:Onavo app by triffid_98 · · Score: 1

      That depends, who would you prefer knows which applications you run on a day to day basis?

      As someone with a data plan that's not at all unlimited I find it a valuable tool, and now that Zuckerberg has paid 100M for it, he can find out all about my non-existant Facebook related data usage.

    7. Re:Onavo app by Chrisq · · Score: 1

      No, i doubt that they will be gathering intercept information on them, unless they are planning on being suicide bombers. I mean Muslim terrorists of course

    8. Re:Onavo app by Sun · · Score: 1

      As far as I can see, an Israeli company's chances of backdooring its own product to help the Israeli intelligence are much lower than an American's.

      My source - I have been in charge of product security for Check Point between late 2000 and early 2003. Never once saw any sign of back door. Never saw any request to backdoor. Was never asked to ignore or bury a vulnerability. Was never dissuaded from conducting proactive audits to find vulnerabilities.

      What's your source?

      Shachar

      P.S.
      Yes, I know that it is possible to read what I wrote as saying that American companies are backdooring their products to help Israeli intelligence. I made a conscious decision not to fix it. You are now free to make fun of this mistake. Enjoy.

    9. Re:Onavo app by Chrisq · · Score: 1

      I think that since the founder of akamai was killed by the muzzys I am sure that they will be on the side of the good guys.

    10. Re:Onavo app by Elbart · · Score: 1

      If you mean Onavo's traffic-counter: 3G Watchdog is very good.

  2. Re:Technology is all about marketing now. by Opportunist · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Capitalism is about to come apart at the seams, actually. It was about a product and selling a product. All that's left by now is selling, and the current pinnacle of the devolution is that we're just selling the selling now.

    That's what Facebook is, essentially. It's selling you info that allows you to sell your products. Since that is far more profitable than actually selling a product (because you have the expense of actually making a product) whereas Facebook can simply sell a "self producing" product (its users), market dictates that everyone will have to follow. And even a surplus of supply, something that should limit the appeal to become a supplier yourself instead of providing other goods and services, has a self propagating and boosting effect, because the more companies sell selling info, the more the very same companies need selling info to stay competitive.

    In the end, all that's left is a circle jerk of people telling each other how to sell something better. Problem is just that nobody is selling a product anymore that anyone would possibly actually WANT to have.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  3. Facebook is an Israeli/US intelligence operation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    As the Snowden leaks made clear, ALL surveillance data goes to Israel and many of the "companies" that produce the software for this and other espionage purposes are based there.

  4. "mission to connect more people to the internet" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My, aren't they philantropic all of a sudden. Except that "the internet" means "facebook", and the price tag is having everything you post as well as everything else you do, slurped up, sliced, diced, analysed, sold off to the highest bidder in convenient packages, and regularly dressed up in a "New! Improved!" privacy policy, which usually means less choice to bare ever more, for you.

    Of course, we all expect cheese-curdling weaselspeak from this sort of announcement, but even that has limits, and even here they "innovate". Yep, that's the face of "innovation" these days. Better get used to it, more is coming.

  5. Re:"mission to connect more people to the internet by amiga3D · · Score: 2

    The fact is that over 90 percent of the public doesn't give a shit about privacy. If they did facebook would have disappeared by now. I deleted my facebook account 3 years ago, I only had it at all to see pictures of my grand children that my daughter and daughter-in-law posted there. Eventually I got so annoyed with facebook's crap I just deleted the damn thing. All this ranting is pointless though because almost everyone on facebook knows that they have no privacy and don't care about it.

  6. NSA tie in? by j33px0r · · Score: 2

    So my questions are: Does being based in Israel provide Facebook's Israeli "subsidiaries" with the ability to use the data from Facebook users differently, that is, in a way that is similar in some aspect to how Israel has access to raw collect NSA data on American citizens in ways that American law doesn't allow? Not to be all conspiracy theory driven but is there a Facebook / NSA connection in this?

    I'm thinking back to the earlier /. post on "NSA Shares Intel On Americans With Israel" http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/09/11/1752223/nsa-shares-intel-on-americans-with-israel

  7. Re:Technology is all about marketing now. by mfwitten · · Score: 1

    Problem is just that nobody is selling a product anymore that anyone would possibly actually WANT to have.

    Then how do people pay Facebook for its information?

    Geesh. It's hard to believe the crap that people upvote on Slashdot.

  8. Re:Facebook is an Israeli/US intelligence operatio by gmhowell · · Score: 1

    You do know that the founders of Facebook are all Jews right?

    So your theory is that The Winklevoss Twins were cut off because goyim?

    --
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  9. Re:"mission to connect more people to the internet by amiga3D · · Score: 1

    Have you ever talked to any of these people about the fact that facebook datamines them and sells all their personal info? I have. To dozens of people. Out of all of those, every single one without exception, the response was always some form of "so what." Yeah they don't want their friends to know what they're talking about on the phone maybe and they probably don't want their coworkers knowing all about them but when it's just some faceless global corporation it's like it's okay. Really all the stuff that I had on facebook, which was very little, I basically didn't care about either but then I kept my personal info to a minimum. A lot of people have their entire lives online.