Facebook Will Shut Down Its Spyware VPN App Onavo (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday February 21, 2019 @11:00PM from the gig-is-up dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facebook will end its unpaid market research programs and proactively take its Onavo VPN app off the Google Play store in the wake of backlash following TechCrunch's investigation about Onavo code being used in a Facebook Research app the sucked up data about teens. The Onavo Protect app will eventually shut down, and will immediately cease pulling in data from users for market research though it will continue operating as a Virtual Private Network in the short-term to allow users to find a replacement. Facebook has also ceased to recruit new users for the Facebook Research app that still runs on Android but was forced off of iOS by Apple after we reported on how it violated Apple's Enterprise Certificate program for employee-only apps. Existing Facebook Research app studies will continue to run, though. Onavo billed itself as a way to "limit apps from using background data and use a secure VPN network for your personal info" but also noted it would collect the "Time you spend using apps, mobile and Wi-Fi data you use per app, the websites you visit, and your country, device and network type." A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the change and provided this statement: "Market research helps companies build better products for people. We are shifting our focus to reward-based market research which means we're going to end the Onavo program."

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Re:Apple made a huge mistake here by radarskiy · 2019-02-22 01:29 · Score: 3, Insightful

Pulling the developer certs would only affect public users of released versions of apps other than Onavo. The PR fallout would be "Apple took away my Facebook" and "Apple made an arbitrary decision just to hurt Facebook" verging on "zOMG antitrust". In addition, Onavo would keep working.
By pulling the enterprise certs the only collateral damage is inside Facebook, since Facebook was using the same enterprise certs for the internal apps and beta testing that were actually what enterprise certs are for, and they have the advantage that this is a policy spelled out ahead of time.