Facebook Launches New 'Market Research' App To Collect Even More Data From Users

I’m sure this won’t be as predatory to users as their last few attempts were.

In case you aren’t caught up, Facebook has had multiple products lately which were designed to harvest data from those they conned into using them, including the “Onavo” VPN service and the “Facebook Research” app. Both of them used shady data collection tactics where they wedged themselves deep into the settings of the devices they were installed on, and then funneled information about almost every interaction that users had on those devices back to Facebook to be analyzed and sold.

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

The company also says it won’t share information from the app to third parties or share your Facebook Viewpoints activity on Facebook.

Facebook says a lot of things; you’d be an idiot to believe any of it. Only an absolute fool would install this new “Viewpoints” app.

Food for thought: if a company is willing to pay you to share data with them, especially if it’s data that seems benign, imagine how much that data must actually be worth. They don’t care about your individual answers, they care about being able to manipulate people at scale. There’s proof that it works, and they’re willing to pay for the data that enables that.