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Facebook's mobile app is promoting a VPN service from a company that it acquired in 2013. The hard-to-find privacy policy and non-disclosure of Facebook's ownership are setting off alarm bells:
Facebook is now offering some mobile app users a wireless-networking app without first disclosing that it's owned by Facebook, or that it collects information for the social networking company.
The app, Onavo Protect, provides users with a virtual private network, or VPN. Typically, a VPN cloaks the user's identity and adds other security features, making it a more secure way to get online, particularly when using public Wi-Fi networks.
Yet the Onavo app also tracks data that it shares with Facebook and others, "including the applications installed on your device, your use of those applications, the websites you visit and the amount of data you use," according to its own privacy policies.
Also at TechCrunch and Gizmodo.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Wednesday February 14 2018, @08:49AM
I've heard similar from several sources. One was told to me by someone who had a major argument in the 1950s during college with an avowed Communist and fan of the Soviet Union. The Communist bragged that by playing the long game, they'd be able to grind away at the right end of the political spectrum in the US until it was suitable for their goals. The idea was to eventually run a far right candidate that would in reality tick all their check boxes. I suppose that Russia, despite no longer being even remotely communist any more has continued with such a programs if it was a real thing.
Even in the 1980s and 1990s there were secretive Communist operatives hanging around some areas and fishing around in certain groups looking for people to recruit. Nothing like the Finnish Taistolaistet movement in scope and power, but no less pernicious. Secretive as fsck though. I expect they're still around and still doing what they can to cause harm and destruction for the sake of causing harm and destruction. But those are an anachronism as what's left of the Soviet empire has mostly collapsed and the remnants have come to espouse neo-liberal capitalism, which is a different disease, if there is enough structure remaining to do that.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.