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> Any other company could hire this firm and made the same decisions

Facebook bought Onavo in 2013 [1].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/facebook-buys-mobile-analy...

Interesting, didn't know that. Did Onavo have access to data that other public BI firms don't?

> Did Onavo have access to data that other public BI firms don't?

Yes. Onavo built “consumer-facing apps to help optimise device and app performance and battery life on iOS and Android devices” [1] while piping their users’ data to Facebook.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/facebook-buys-mobile-analy...

So they were basically the spamware apps like flashlight and other 'performance enhancers'? That makes this kind of worse, especially if they continued it after acquisition.

Not really, they built an actual data compression VPN for users with limited data plans and did traffic analysis on the data that went through that pipe.

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