LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - Facebook has been accused of "secretly" paying young people to install a research app on their mobile phones to access all of the phone's activity and information in its latest move to gather data on its competitors.
The users installed the 'Facebook Research' virtual private network (VPN) on their phones, TechCrunch reported on Wednesday.

The project could have been a violation of Apple policy since it would have given Facebook access to private network traffic, akin to Facebook's Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June.

The project was started in 2016 and the social media giant has been paying users ages 13 to 35 up to $20 per month plus referral fees to sell their privacy.

Facebook said it was running the Research program to gather data on usage habits.

The app had access to the contents of private messages in chat apps including photos and videos, emails, web browsing activity, logs of app installation and when they were used, location history and data usage.

It is still unclear if the social network ran the programme also outside the US.

A spokeswoman for Facebook told TechCrunch: "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% of the people who chose to participate in this market research program were teens. All of them with signed parental consent forms."

Facebook admitted to the BBC that the parental consent was handled by a third party and did not elaborate further.

Facebook's Research program will continue to run on Android and there is still no news from Apple to see whether Facebook officially violated its policy.

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