Facebook has been paying people to install a “Research” VPN

Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Project Atlas

TechCrunch recently received a tip that despite Onavo Protect being banished by Apple, Facebook was paying users to sideload a similar VPN app under the Facebook Research moniker from outside of the App Store. Security expert Will Strafach found Facebook’s Research app contains lots of code from Onavo Protect, the Facebook-owned app Apple banned last year

Once installed, users just had to keep the VPN running and sending data to Facebook to get paid.

Source: techcrunch.com