3 ms·
Agreed. Facebook purchased third-party data to guide their acquisition strategy. Any other company could hire this firm and made the same decisions. The sele
by bduerst 8y ago
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.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> 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-analytics-company-onavo-and-finally-gets-its-office-in-israel/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/facebook-buys-mobile-analy...
- bduerst 8y agoInteresting, didn't know that. Did Onavo have access to data that other public BI firms don't?
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> 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-analytics-company-onavo-and-finally-gets-its-office-in-israel/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/facebook-buys-mobile-analy...
- bduerst 8y agoSo 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.
- traek 8y agoNot 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.