Facebook Study: new app will pay you in exchange for recording your data

The new app is only for people aged 18 and over, unlike previous Facebook research apps 
Kev Costello / Unsplash
Amelia Heathman12 June 2019

Cast your mind back to January, when a TechCrunch investigation discovered that Facebook was encouraging people to install a VPN that allowed it to access all of a user’s phone and web activity.

Unsurprisingly, the Apple App Store doesn’t allow apps like this so Facebook was encouraging people to download the app and give it “route access to network traffic” to get around Apple’s rules and allow the company to know everything a person was doing on their device, in exchange for payment.

Initially aimed at teenagers, it was the latest in a long line of data scandals at Facebook’s hands and people were not impressed. Facebook pulled the app and we thought it was the end of it.

Facebook’s research methods are back with a new app called Study. Available in the US and India, the company will again being paying people to monitor their phone use. It may expand to other countries in the future

Study will monitor which apps are installed on a person’s phone, the time spent using them, which country you’re in, as well as any additional app data around features that are being used.

What it won’t monitor is content such as messages, passwords and websites, and the information it collects will not be used to target ads at you.

So what’s different about Study compared to what Facebook was doing before? This new app is only available on Android, which means users will have to specifically agree to the type of access the app will have and it will only be available to people aged 18 and over.

How the new Facebook Study app will look
Facebook

Facebook says user age will be verified depending on the age on their Facebook account and payment can only be accepted by PayPal, which has an 18+ age requirement.

Whilst the previous Facebook research app paid around $20 (£15.27) a month, plus referral fees, the company has declined to say how much it will pay users for their data.

In a blog post, Facebook product manager Sagee Ben-Zedeff said: “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. 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.”

Despite the data scandals that have hit the company, people are still using Facebook a lot. In the first quarter of 2019, the daily active users increased 8 per cent from last year to 1.56 billion, whilst monthly active users was also up 8 per cent to 2.38 billion.

Facebook uses data to sell ads and makes a lot of money doing so – it made $15 billion (about £11.7 billion) in revenue in Q1 2019 in fact, so you could argue that at least an app like Study allows the consumer to make some money back in a way. But it is at the expense of giving Facebook more access to your life than it already has.

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