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A comment on Facebook's seized files published by MPs. Parent comment

Re:Facebook's seized files published by MPs by bduerst on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @11:12AM (#18609535)
Agreed. Facebook purchased third-party data to guide their acquisition strategy. Any other company could hire this firm and made the same decisions.

The selective access to competing apps, based solely on this information, is antitrust though. If the apps violate rules that apply to everyone, that's different, but that doesn't appear to be the case?

Edit: turns out Onovo had access to specific, proprietary data, acquired through it's own shitty apps, which facebook acquired. This is pretty shady.

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Re:Facebook's seized files published by MPs by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @11:13AM (#18609550)
> Any other company could hire this firm and made the same decisions

Facebook bought Onavo in 2013 [1].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/facebook-buys-mobile-analy...

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Re:Facebook's seized files published by MPs by bduerst on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @11:16AM (#18609582)
Interesting, didn't know that. Did Onavo have access to data that other public BI firms don't?
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Re:Facebook's seized files published by MPs by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @11:17AM (#18609593)
> Did Onavo have access to data that other public BI firms don't?

Yes. Onavo built “consumer-facing apps to help optimise device and app performance and battery life on iOS and Android devices” [1] while piping their users’ data to Facebook.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/facebook-buys-mobile-analy...

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Re:Facebook's seized files published by MPs by bduerst on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @11:27AM (#18609703)
So they were basically the spamware apps like flashlight and other 'performance enhancers'? That makes this kind of worse, especially if they continued it after acquisition.
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Re:Facebook's seized files published by MPs by traek on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @03:49PM (#18612386)
Not really, they built an actual data compression VPN for users with limited data plans and did traffic analysis on the data that went through that pipe.
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