by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

Tell me again why Facesucker hasn’t had all of its apps forcibly removed from both the IOS and Android stores, given this….

Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store and rewards teenagers and adults to download the Research app and give it root access to network traffic in what may be a violation of Apple policy so the social network can decrypt and analyze their phone activity, a TechCrunch investigation confirms. Facebook admitted to TechCrunch it was running the Research program to gather data on usage habits.

The worst part of this is that when you install this you must also install a root certificate in your phone.

I have one of these (a root certificate I generated.)  It’s mine. It’s used to validate machine certificates for things I have here, including my private VPN.  A root certificate, when installed on an Android device, causes it to warn that traffic may be monitored, because it can be.

In this case it is.

For the last two+ years the company has been bribing teens — people who are not legally competent to contract — to sell themselves on a 24×7 basis to the company for roughly $20/month.  While they “say” you must get parental consent there is utterly no way to enforce that since doing so would require positive ID checks in person.

Of course Facebook doesn’t do that.

Never mind that by definition such a program (whether loaded on a minor’s device or an adult’s) is unconscionable since there’s no possible way for the person “agreeing” to it to know what you are collecting in detail nor to what uses you might put the data, now and in the future.

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