Do Not, I Repeat, Do Not Download Onavo, Facebook’s Vampiric VPN Service

Gizmodo ^ | Dell Cameron

[BenLurkin]

Facebook is not a privacy company; it’s Big Brother on PCP. It does not want to anonymize and protect you; it wants to drain you of your privacy, sucking up every bit of personal data. You should resist the urge to let it, at every turn.

There’s a new menu item in the Facebook app, first reported by TechCrunch on Monday, labeled “Protect.” Clicking it will send you to the App Store and prompt you to download a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service called Onavo. (“Protect” shows up in the iOS app. Gizmodo looked for it on an Android device and didn’t see it—though, presumably it is only a matter of time.)

VPNs work by forcing your laptop or mobile device to establish a connection to a third-party server before then connecting you to any websites or online services. Using an encrypted tunnel, a VPN can prevent your broadband or wireless provider (AT&T, Comcast, et al) from keeping track of the websites you visit. What’s more, a VPN service can mask your own IP address from those websites, helping you to traverse the net without surrendering locational data. VPNs also help users in authoritarian countries bypass censors by convincing websites their country of origin is, for example, the US or Switzerland, the latter of which has some of the world’s strictest privacy laws.

Facebook, however....is actually collecting and analyzing the data of Onavo users. Doing so allows Facebook to monitor the online habits of people outside their use of the Facebook app itself. For instance, this gave the company insight into Snapchat’s dwindling user base, even before the company announced a period of diminished growth last year.

To put it another way, Onavo is corporate spyware.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

That sounds more like management or salesman speak.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

That sounds more like management or salesman speak.

[Mr. K]

um ... how?

[JoeProBono]