Facebook is not a privacy company ; it ’s fully grown Brother on PCP . It does not want to anonymize and protect you ; it wants to drain you of your privacy , sucking up every bit of personal data point . You should resist the urge to let it , at every twist .
There ’s a raw menu item in the Facebook app , firstreported by TechCrunchon Monday , labeled “ Protect . ” Clicking it will send you to the App Store and prompt you to download a Virtual Private internet ( VPN ) religious service called Onavo . ( “ Protect ” show up in the iOS app . Gizmodo looked for it on an Android gadget and did n’t see it — though , presumably it is only a matter of time . )
Millions of people use VPNs to enhance their concealment online . But that is not Onavo ’s function .
VPNs do work by drive your laptop computer or nomadic machine to instal a connexion to a third - political party server before then connecting you to any websites or online service . Using an encrypted tunnel , a VPN can prevent your broadband or wireless provider ( AT&T , Comcast , et al ) from keeping trail of the websites you visit . What ’s more , a VPN serve can mask your own IP address from those websites , assist you to traverse the earnings without surrendering locational datum . VPNs also help oneself users in authoritarian countries get around censor by convincing site their country of origin is , for lesson , the US or Switzerland , the latter of which has some of the world ’s strict privacy law of nature .
Facebook , however , buy Onavo from an Israeli firm in 2013 for an entirely different reason , as described in aWall Street Journalreport last summertime . The ship’s company is really pile up and analyse the information of Onavo users . Doing so provide Facebook to monitor the online substance abuse of multitude outside their use of the Facebook app itself . For instance , this gave the company perceptiveness into Snapchat ’s dwindling exploiter nucleotide , even before the companionship announced a period of atrophied growing last year .
To put it another way , Onavo is corporate spyware .
If you ’re someone who ca n’t live without Facebook or plainly ca n’t discover the courageousness to erase it , the Onavo appears under the “ Explore ” listing just above the “ scope ” menu . I ’d advocate you never come home it . Facebook is already vacuum-clean up enough your data without you giving them permission to supervise every internet site you jaw .
If you ’d like to use a VPN overhaul , there are literally tens of K to choose from . The good ones cost money — usually $ 5 to $ 10 a month . It ’s crucial to call up , while they disguise your activity from your ISP , the VPN company itself may be able to see virtually everything you do online .
For that reason alone , recommend a estimable VPN military service can be tricky . But if you ’d like one to check out , stress givingPrivate Internet Accessa look . And train yourself : Read more about how VPNs ferment at theElectronic Frontier Foundation .
[ TechCrunch ]
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