Why Apple went to war with Facebook and Google this week
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/1...k-google-app-store-pull-blocked-vergecast-339
NP: So Facebook very famously owned a VPN called Onavo, which is a bad name. And so famously Facebook bought this VPN company. They let people install Onovo protectors, and the app ran all the traffic through this VPN to say you were more secure but really what Facebook was doing was monitoring this traffic to see which apps were taking off, which features you were using. So this is how they discovered that WhatsApp was taking off. I believe before they acquired WhatsApp, it’s how they discovered Snapchat Stories were taking off, and they cloned it to Instagram Stories. So Facebook is monitoring user behavior on the iPhone through this novel protect app.
At one point, I believe they even had a tab in Facebook. The big blue app that said Onovo Protect to try to get you to install a novel protect, which is insane. This all came out. Apple said “Wait wait wait. This is not cool. We do not want anyone.” We saw Facebook monitoring user data. That’s why they banned Onovo protect. But it turns out, the same code and the headers of the research app were being used for this Facebook research. So Facebook is running a research program where everyone is focused on teens. I think it was more than teens, right?
NP: They were targeting people ages 13 to 35, so a broad definition of “teen,” but teen is in the mix where you would get like a $20 gift card if you sign up for this program through one of their vendors. They would send you the certificate that lets you side-load apps onto an iPhone. Famously, you cannot silo apps onto an iPhone — you have to go through the App Store — but if you have an enterprise certificate, you can deploy apps without the App Store. So Facebook would send you their enterprise certificate, you would side-load this app that had a ton of a Navajo code in it, and it would monitor everything that was happening on your phone. In some cases, it appears they were able to bypass that layer on even encrypted chats, too.