The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Competition From Startups
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WTF is this shady-ass sh*t. Way to "secure users' privacy," Facebook.
From the sound of Onavo's App Store reviews they are using deceptive marketing of the "Your phone is infected, install this now!!" variety. Yet they have a lot of positive but suspiciously brief reviews balancing them out. So Facebook bought a company that MITMs unsuspecting users for profit, using scammer marketing techniques and fake reviews to drive installs, then leverages that to knife babies. "Don't be too proud," indeed.
I hope there is cause for Apple to remove this app from the App Store (like deceptive marketing or exploitive practices). Or for a bunch of us good folks to leave negative reviews. These guys depend on informed people avoiding these apps and not leaving reviews.
Edit: they also gather this data even if you don't use their VPN service. But I don't think average users care that much if Facebook knows the distribution of time spent on Twitter by all people using that app.
First there is the marketing scam reported in the app store reviews, people who installed it because some web site told them they have a virus and they need this thing to fix it.
Second, the only mention of their logging practices is buried below the fold in the last line of their description: "Onavo receives and analyzes information about your mobile data and app use." This is just vague enough to deceive a user that believes it is merely to support their user-facing features, i.e. giving you a report on what you use... not Facebook for spying purposes. Of course, most users never even get that far in the description. They're installing this to "secure their phone" because of a scary ad they saw.
These guys know exactly what they're doing. Most of their users, not so much. That's where we come in. The App Store exists to help protect users from this kind of exploitation and I hope Apple and our community takes action.
This is common and I am not entirely sure Onavo supports this wittingly. Most times that I have seen it, the ad redirects to the "Norton Wi-Fi Privacy" page on the App Store instead.
Agreed on point #2, they should be much more clear on what they do with user data.
some web site told them they have a virus and they need this thing to fix it
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12613402/android-statist... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41768642/detect-current-...
They just want to know how much do you use each app on your phone and not anything related to the TCP exchange. Therefore no MITM has to take place.
The rest, I fully agree with you: one deception paves way to another. I think just making users aware that it's Facebook tracking their app usage and not some "Onavo" would be enough for people to think better about their privacy.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20014123/how-does-appann...
[1] "Our goal is to provide you with a free, simple service without ads. To keep our service free, we provide research on market trends to help create better apps." https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-data-manager-track-your/i...
You have to wonder how many of those apps had deals to sell "anonymized" data to FB or Google and whether Apple saw this as a threat to its platform or products. Many of the TOS's could have been read to allow even raw data going to an "affiliate" which FB could easily have become for any number of them.
This coming on the heels of removing native FB support in iOS 11. Although, that was likely unrelated to data leakage.
They are not being pulled, but none will be able to update and will be de-listed if they don't issue an update to remove the functionality.
https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardForiOS/issues/445#issu...
Maybe de-listed is the better term.
De-listed plus impossible to get new ones approved.
This did lead to a lot of momentum to the anti-trust proceedings against Microsoft.
I wonder if that encourages Facebook to not do this so obviously in the future? Or maybe it isn't at all worried about anti-trust for the near term.
I am sure Google, Amazon and Microsoft continue to do doing this as well, but it seems that Facebook is doing this most successfully or at least most prominently with its total destruction of Snap.
I guess it is different in that Google and Facebook both have very effective means to accurately measure adoption trends of new successful market entrants, and thus can target these entrants better than ever before with total destruction.
This is just killer:
> In December, Facebook began its group-video-chat offensive. Its Messenger app introduced the feature with the ability to see up to six people in a conversation, compared with the eight-person rooms on Houseparty.
> In February, Facebook invited Houseparty users between the ages of 13 and 17 to come to its offices in Menlo Park, Calif., to participate in a study and keep a diary for a week afterward that they would share with Facebook, offering as an inducement $275 Amazon gift cards.
"Most successfully" is probably hard to measure. While Snap is perhaps the single largest example, both Google and Amazon may have had greater overall benefit of this approach...just in a longer tail way that's hard to quantify as a single big visible event.
How much revenue, for example, has Google extracted from the travel market?
Microsoft would settle the case with the Department of Justice in November of 2001 by agreeing to make it easier for Microsoft's competitors to get their software more closely integrated with the Windows operating system
It followed Ballmer, a softer CEO timeframe. Now Gates with his strawman Nadella got back the power.
The culture was forced to change substantially. Their behavior was monitored by the government for years after. They were no longer able to aggressively compete without chains on their strongest points of leverage. At a time when IE had conquered the browser market, they couldn't use that new monopoly point to attempt to crush Google as one example (which is exactly what they would have done in the late 1980s or early 1990s). It's the same type of restrictive blanket that was put on Intel by the US Government in exchange for allowing them to keep their monopoly.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2017-07-28/rich-barton-...
IG runs like a dream in comparison
Whether it was a good idea or not, I don't know. But I believe that was their thinking at least.
In other words, these are often said to be easily disruptable markets. In fact, wasn't that purported to be a perpetual risk for Facebook? So, if a giant is disrupted by a startup, we'd all cheer for that? But if Snapchat is disrupted by Facebook, we scream bloody murder, 'ey? (I don't like big corporations or monopolies, but I was hoping to point out a form of hypocrisy, along with a desire to not switch social networks too often.)
That demographic is relatively free to chose whichever network to grow up with, according ro where the majority of the cool kids throwing partyes and living the life are.
Old users are less active on average and more adverse to advertisement, so getting constant new blood is quite inportant to fb
"Facebook uses an internal database to track rivals, including young startups performing unusually well, people familiar with the system say. The database stems from Facebook’s 2013 acquisition of a Tel Aviv-based startup, Onavo, which had built an app that secures users’ privacy by routing their traffic through private servers. The app gives Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on their phones, these people say.
The tool shaped Facebook’s decision to buy WhatsApp and informed its live-video strategy, they say. Facebook used Onavo to build its early-bird tool that tips it off to promising services and that helped Facebook home in on Houseparty"
https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/31/app-annie-fills-the-void-l...
I think about this a lot and at the end of the day a founder has to decide if they care about their own payday or the broader ecosystem/market of independent products.
If you fall into the latter camp, then assuming you are even successful in the market, you should prepare to die by your sword. Otherwise, the big 5 just keep getting bigger with more advocates and authority.
You could argue that joining them will be better in the end because you just bide your time and leave to start something even bigger, but the reality is you'll have the same dilemma in the future. So why wait to take a stand and try to compete?
The real question is if it's even practically possible to compete. Given that VC are generally too timid to fund anything which could get beaten by the big ones, there aren't a whole lot of options to growth fund something which really could compete.
I think the solution has to be in fixing the system. As long as we're saying this is a competitive, free market but only so long as the individuals in it act in the interest of everyone and not just themselves then we're doomed. We need some wide ranging updates to the antitrust literature.
There was once a time when video chat was novel, but now since the technology is "done", there is nothing hard about developing these services from a technical perspective. Handling scale and various other things with these products used to be a challenge but now we have the cloud, API's and a mature ecosystem. The world really doesn't need more of the same kinds of communication apps, it all just becomes a gimmick and less of a utility.
So, most of these products will be successful based upon other factors -- such as the cleverness of their marketing, or whether or not they serve a niche that is lucrative enough and underserved enough on which to build a successful business, but not large enough to attract the attention of one of the goliaths.
The one advantage startups have over large corporations like Facebook is their size and speed at which they can move. Engineers at Facebook, like any large tech company, are encumbered by substantial process, political forces, and a reluctance to try new ideas. Your typical startup employee is also far more motivated than an engineer who just wants to be given their daily JIRA tasks. To be honest, why does a single app need a team of 500 (frontend) engineers in the first place? When a tech company gets large, it becomes more about business than technology, anyways.
So, it doesn't come as much of a shock Facebook is turning to the startup world to source their ideas and duplicate them, which is why I advise all my friends to steer clear of any of these "we're a better way to share/video chat/chat/message/communicate" startups. Only go to one if you have some burning technical itch. The one exception is if the founders aren't totally delusional and the company operates more under the impression of just getting an MVP built, with the idea of shopping it around to be acquired in short order. And in this case, know exactly how long that's going to take, take no VC funding, have no delusions of grandeur and as an engineer know exactly what cut you're going to get when the thing gets sold. I've only seen this work if the founders know someone at the big company and the thing has all been basically pre-arranged though.
Most things can be easily copied if you throw enough money and developer hours at it
I would argue everything can be copied from a technical standpoint (excluding patent issues.) Marketing and user adoption may or may not be successfully copied though.
That and hangout mobile sucked balls at the beginning and for quite a long time after
This is why horizontal scalability should be a basic requirement in such a product. These days there's a blanket statement used throughout the industry that premature optimization is bad. It is bad if you're developing a website or a stand alone mobile app. But if you're doing something in communications field (or data, IoT, etc.) scalability is a must-have.
My main point was that one-size-fits-all methodologies don't suit every software project. In some cases it makes sense to build the feature first and then worry about scaling but in some cases like this it doesn't.
I've seen quite a few projects fail because the engineers didn't think through the ability of the system for handling more users/connections/data. A little thought before starting the project usually helps avoid ops headache and costly rewrites later.
Big issues I see are the vast majority of people just don't want to think about it, and there aren't any good systems in place to empower (the majority of) people to retain their data.
FB did an amazing job in keeping their acquisitions fairly independent and let them keep grow. That's something really hard to do and they deserve credit for that.
It is easy to buy the #1 messaging app in the world, if you have the money. It is hard to make sure those people still stay motivated after the acquisition.
Wait!.. you mean an app(like facebook) where users voluntarily enter the intimate details of their personal lives doesn't respect their privacy? Sorry for the bias folks, but facebook users typically don't respect even their own privacy.
There are examples of companies that made a success of focusing-in on one aspect of a larger successful company (e.g. the companies that split out the functionality of craigslist).
But, this feels like an example of what happens when you mistake a Feature for a Business.
How do you distinguish between the two cases?
1> New apps with user base in the millions and monthly growth rate in double digit % 2> Significant VC/angel funding 3> Positive press coverage.
This data collection doesn't require violating anyone's privacy and can even be outsourced to a third party on a monthly basis for a trivial cost.
So, why are there accusations about monopolistic behavior? MSFT was trying to block competition via illegal means, like incentivizing partners to use MSFT products, or going after the competition with expensive (bogus) patent claims, but FB is doing none of that.