Facebook Launches New Pay for Data App Despite Criticism

Facebook constantly comes under fire for the way it treats user data, and its previous attempts at monetizing the data it mines from its users have been heavily criticized. One attempt at obtaining data from users that Facebook tried earlier this year involved paying teenagers to grant Facebook access to their phone’s data which would tell the social media platform which apps the user had downloaded and how often they used them along with a wide variety of other data that Facebook would then sell to brands and agencies for marketing purposes.

In spite of the fact that Facebook came under heavy fire for this attempt to pay users to grant access to their data, that too the target market in that instance being teenagers, the social media platform has launched another app that is purportedly paying people to grant Facebook access to their data. This unrestricted access would help Facebook obtain quite a bit of information from the users as well as get an imprint of their phone usage times along with other bits of data, but a lot of people are questioning the ethics of this app.

"Approaching market research in a responsible way is really important. Transparency and handling people’s information responsibly have guided how we’ve built Study from Facebook [app]. We plan to take this same approach going forward with other market research projects that help us understand how people use different products and services.", announced Sagee Ben-Zedeff, Facebook's Product Manager, in a blog post.

The app, which is currently only available on the Google Play Store, involves a registration form that would decide whether or not the user is eligible to download it. The amount of money that each user would be paid in exchange for access to their data has not been disclosed, but it’s probably going to be more than the pittance that Google was offering teenagers in exchange for access to their data which makes the ethics of the whole matter even more confusing.



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