The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Startup Competition (wsj.com)
> Facebook uses an internal database to track rivals… The database stems from Facebook’s 2013 acquisition of a Tel Aviv-based startup, Onavo, which had built an app that secures users’ privacy by routing their traffic through private servers. The app gives Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on their phones…
WTF is this shady-ass sh*t. Way to “secure users’ privacy,” Facebook.
From the sound of Onavo’s App Store reviews they are using deceptive marketing of the “Your phone is infected, install this now!!” variety. Yet they have a lot of positive but suspiciously brief reviews balancing them out. So Facebook bought a company that MITMs unsuspecting users for profit, using scammer marketing techniques and fake reviews to drive installs, then leverages that to knife babies. “Don’t be too proud,” indeed.
I hope there is cause for Apple to remove this app from the App Store (like deceptive marketing or exploitive practices). Or for a bunch of us good folks to leave negative reviews. These guys depend on informed people avoiding these apps and not leaving reviews.
.. You have to intercept to gather metadata… but semantics aside, they are deceiving users.First there is the marketing scam reported in the app store reviews, people who installed it because some web site told them they have a virus and they need this thing to fix it.
Second, the only mention of their logging practices is buried below the fold in the last line of their description: “Onavo receives and analyzes information about your mobile data and app use.” This is just vague enough to deceive a user that believes it is merely to support their user-facing features, i.e. giving you a report on what you use… not Facebook for spying purposes. Of course, most users never even get that far in the description. They’re installing this to “secure their phone” because of a scary ad they saw.
These guys know exactly what they’re doing. Most of their users, not so much. That’s where we come in. The App Store exists to help protect users from this kind of exploitation and I hope Apple and our community takes action.
.. What struck me from the article was how facebook knew what social networks are competitive threats. They’re tracking what apps you use on your phone.”Facebook uses an internal database to track rivals, including young startups performing unusually well, people familiar with the system say. The database stems from Facebook’s 2013 acquisition of a Tel Aviv-based startup, Onavo, which had built an app that secures users’ privacy by routing their traffic through private servers. The app gives Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on their phones, these people say.
The tool shaped Facebook’s decision to buy WhatsApp and informed its live-video strategy, they say. Facebook used Onavo to build its early-bird tool that tips it off to promising services and that helped Facebook home in on Houseparty”
.. Facebook is what Microsoft was in the 1990s. Using its existing market dominance to crush potential competitors by offering their distinctive offerings as mere features of its existing popular products.This did lead to a lot of momentum to the anti-trust proceedings against Microsoft.
I wonder if that encourages Facebook to not do this so obviously in the future? Or maybe it isn’t at all worried about anti-trust for the near term.
I am sure Google, Amazon and Microsoft continue to do doing this as well, but it seems that Facebook is doing this most successfully or at least most prominently with its total destruction of Snap.
.. This is just killer:
> In December, Facebook began its group-video-chat offensive. Its Messenger app introduced the feature with the ability to see up to six people in a conversation, compared with the eight-person rooms on Houseparty.
> In February, Facebook invited Houseparty users between the ages of 13 and 17 to come to its offices in Menlo Park, Calif., to participate in a study and keep a diary for a week afterward that they would share with Facebook, offering as an inducement $275 Amazon gift cards.