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Is It Time To Face(book) The Facts, Privacy Isn’t As Big An Issue As We First Thought…?
It feels like not a week goes by without another tech privacy scandal hitting the news, whether it’s Facebook oversharing our data, Alexa listening to our conversations or Google+’s flaws compromising our information. With all of these “scandals” are consumers really focused on how their data is used and if not, should they be?
Most recently, the press has been littered with news that Facebook had been paying users to collect data on their mobile activity via a Facebook Research app. Apple said Facebook was abusing a tool, known as a developer enterprise certificate, to distribute this app on iPhones in a way that allowed the social network to avoid Apple’s restrictions on data collection.
If users consent to having this information accessed and are paid for sharing, is there really an issue here? Provided that no one was misled into thinking their data was being used for anything other than Facebook’s research and given the details of how the data and information would be used, it should be down to the user to determine if they would like to participate.
Despite the media scaremongering, it doesn’t appear that there was any secrecy and dishonesty around the installation of the app or what it was to be used for. Although TechCrunch does suggest…
