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I’m curious about this. Is it not possible to buy usage data from other network operators without owning them? As much as I hate it, I’d expect this is sold muc

I’m curious about this. Is it not possible to buy usage data from other network operators without owning them? As much as I hate it, I’d expect this is sold much like location data is. Sure, you may not get the raw traffic but that seems not very useful for FB.

Lammy 4y ago
A lot of that data probably is for sale, but think how much more powerful the VPN is when the metadata is more valuable than the probably-encrypted-anyway raw traffic: - you can directly correlate an Onavo user's traffic to their Facebook profile for demographic and interest data which telecoms won't even know. - if two Onavo users are both Facebook users, you can identify up-and-coming apps which pose a threat to Facebook's most valuable asset: the social network itself (the links between people, not any FB software). That includes both explicit links ("Friend" requests) as well as implicit links like mutual group memberships, mutual participation in comment threads, mutual "private" sharing of the same content, etc. - you get a more complete picture of a person's phone habits across the entire day, not just when the Facebook app is front and center. Remember that this happened immediately after the failure of the "Facebook Home" product which provided application usage tracking by acting as an Android "Launcher" replacement. - you get a more complete picture of up-and-coming apps' "stickiness", i.e. if a person opens the competitor app immediately when a notification comes in versus if they leave it for a while and get back to it later. - you get a more complete picture in markets where dual-SIM phones are popular (e.g. when people might have voice/SMS service on one and pre-paid data on the other). - you get a more complete picture in markets where people seek out Wi-Fi for high-bandwidth activities due to the expense or unavailability of unlimited mobile data. - you can use Facebook's ad targeting system to directly push Onavo on people in markets you want to enter and dominate.

Lammy 4y ago

A lot of that data probably is for sale, but think how much more powerful the VPN is when the metadata is more valuable than the probably-encrypted-anyway raw traffic: - you can directly correlate an Onavo user's traffic to their Facebook profile for demographic and interest data which telecoms won't even know. - if two Onavo users are both Facebook users, you can identify up-and-coming apps which pose a threat to Facebook's most valuable asset: the social network itself (the links between people, not any FB software). That includes both explicit links ("Friend" requests) as well as implicit links like mutual group memberships, mutual participation in comment threads, mutual "private" sharing of the same content, etc. - you get a more complete picture of a person's phone habits across the entire day, not just when the Facebook app is front and center. Remember that this happened immediately after the failure of the "Facebook Home" product which provided application usage tracking by acting as an Android "Launcher" replacement. - you get a more complete picture of up-and-coming apps' "stickiness", i.e. if a person opens the competitor app immediately when a notification comes in versus if they leave it for a while and get back to it later. - you get a more complete picture in markets where dual-SIM phones are popular (e.g. when people might have voice/SMS service on one and pre-paid data on the other). - you get a more complete picture in markets where people seek out Wi-Fi for high-bandwidth activities due to the expense or unavailability of unlimited mobile data. - you can use Facebook's ad targeting system to directly push Onavo on people in markets you want to enter and dominate.