Facebook says it paid teens for data in US and India, but not Australia

Facebook Australia says a controversial program to pay users as young as 13 for access to their data was not carried out locally.

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Picture: AFP

Facebook’s Australian arm has declared a controversial program to pay users as young as 13 $20 per month for access to their personal data was not carried out in Australia.

The tech blog TechCrunch reported overnight that Facebook paid people about $US20 a month to use the ‘Facebook Research’ app, which gave the social media giant access to their phone and web activity, including private messages, internet searches, emails and shopping.

A Facebook spokesman confirmed to The Australian that the research program was limited to the US and India.

“Key facts about this market research program are being ignored,” the spokesman said. “Despite early reports, there was nothing ‘secret’ about this; it was literally called the Facebook Research App. It wasn’t ‘spying’ as all of the people who signed up to participate went through a clear on-boarding process asking for their permission and were paid to participate.

“Finally, less than 5 per cent of the people who chose to participate in this market research program were teens. All of them with signed parental consent forms.”

After the findings were published by TechCrunch, Apple banned the app from iPhones, saying Facebook was in “clear breach” of its policies. The app is still available to download on Android devices.

Apple also banned other internal Facebook apps which circumvented Apple’s app store, including early test versions of Facebook and Instagram, as well as employee apps which are used for things like transportation.

“We’re looking into what happened here, but we would not have done this if we knew we weren’t in compliance,” one employee said. “Our relationship with Apple is really important.

“We would never put that relationship at risk.”

Mobile app security researcher Will Strafach said Facebook doesn’t make it very clear to users precisely what level of access they were granting when they gave permission.

“There is simply no way the users understood this,” he said, adding that Facebook’s claim that users understood the scope of data collection was “muddying the waters.”

An Apple spokesman said in a statement that the company designed its Enterprise Developer Program — which Facebook used for its research app — solely for internal distribution of apps within an organisation.

“Facebook has been using their membership to distribute a data-collecting app to consumers, which is a clear breach of their agreement with Apple,” the spokesman said.

“Any developer using their enterprise certificates to distribute apps to consumers will have their certificates revoked, which is what we did in this case to protect our users and their data.”

Additional reporting: The Times, AP.