Facebook To Launch New Paid Research App To Monitor Competitors

The latest source reveals that Facebook is planning to monitor its competitors and will probably pay its users to implement this idea.

On June 11, the social media company introduced its new research application called Study that is used to gather a variety of data on what kinds of apps are downloaded on smartphones, what features of these apps are often used, as well as the duration users spend on these apps. Study will be promoted through advertisements on Facebook’s own platform and other social networks. In addition, only users beyond 18 years old can take part in this plan.

The participants will receive the compensation money from Facebook; however, the company hasn’t revealed the specific details yet. As expected, the research app Study will be applied in the only two countries including the United States and India.

This is not the first time Facebook has conducted research like this. It will help the US company to keep a tab on competitors, find out growing trends, as well as to detect famous startups that can be acquired.

Study partly shows us Facebook’s intention during its development. At the beginning of 2019, it closed research similar to this research app after the world knew that the company was gathering data from users as teens. At that time, Mark Zuckerberg has no other choice but to remove the Facebook Research App – which allegedly violated the policies on data collection as prescribed by Apple – out of the App Store.

As per Apple, the iDevice maker temporarily suspended a series of internal apps from Facebook, such as the apps that help its workers to search for shuttle schedules or set up meetings. As a result, many processes of Facebook came to a standstill. After that, Facebook stopped this research. Back to the new research app Study, Facebook now focuses on conducting it on the Android platform.

In addition, it stopped an application called Onavo that was developed to route the web activity of users via a virtual private network (VPN) to enhance the security layer for users’data. However, the app also provided the company with important data concerning behavior and internet activities.