REVEALED! Facebook Is Secretly Paying Teens $20 Per Month To Turn Over Data

Facebook has been secretly paying teens and adults $20 a month to turn over all their online activity to the company, according to  an explosive report in TechCrunch. The program, which targeted people aged 13 to 35, required them to download an app on their phone “and give [Facebook] root access to network traffic…so the social network can decrypt and analyze their phone activity.”

The app gave Facebook access to “private messages in social media apps, chats from instant messaging apps – including photos/videos sent to others, emails, web searches, web browsing activity, and even ongoing location information.” It “even asked users to screenshot their Amazon order history page.”

After publication, Facebook told TechCrunch it was shutting down the program. Apple, however, said that Facebook violated its app policy and banned the “Facebook Research” app from its platform.

Previously, Facebook used a similar app, Onavo, to track users’ habits but Apple pulled it over privacy concerns. Onavo gave Facebook the insight to spot the rapid rise of WhatsApp, which it then paid $19 billion to acquire.

According to Popular Information, users downloaded the Facebook Research app outside of the app store, which made the new effort more opaque.

Facebook, which has been battered with criticism over the last year, defended its conduct. “Like many companies, we invite people to participate in research that helps us identify things we can be doing better. Since this research is aimed at helping Facebook understand how people use their mobile devices, we’ve provided extensive information about the type of data we collect and how they can participate,” the company said in a statement.

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The data collection business is quite profitable. On Wednesday, the company announced it raked in  over $16 billion in revenue in the last quarter of 2018.