Facebook Have Been Deliberately Crashing Their Android App
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| The Telegraph |
It becomes very difficult to trust a company when news hits the web that said company has been experimenting on you without your direct permission. It grows even harder when you find out that this was the second time users have been experimented on.
Facebook is a massive company but that brings problems in itself. The war between Google and Facebook seems to be reaching a boiling point and now Facebook are looking into possible options in case the app is booted from the Google Play store. Considering how most Android phones these days come with Facebook already installed, it makes you wonder who exactly this would affect and when. People could simply not update their app or find another way to do it, a download from the mobile site perhaps? But Facebook appear to not want to take the risk.
It has been revealed that Facebook recently altered the coding of the Facebook app so Android users' apps would crash regularly and for an extended period of time. The experiment lasted for a period of several weeks and an informant told The Information that even with the app down people couldn't stay off Facebook. Would the results have changed if people knew the app was down because of an experiment? Most probably people would have been more willing to wait and more likely to be annoyed that the app was down as it wasn't due to maintenance. However this doesn't mean that the affected users should not have been informed afterwards as this technically goes against ethical guidelines.
The last time we know that Facebook experimented on users back in 2014 when they altered users news feeds to highlight either positive or negative posts from their friends. This experiment was done, once again, without explicit consent and could have had a severe effect on some people. At the time this was revealed a spokesperson claimed that Facebook needs to experiment to remain relevant and obviously they believe that this still rings true.
The most recent experiment would not have been as risky to users but it did find that most people cannot go without Facebook. Many users simply accessed Facebook via their mobile internet while the app was down and therefore wouldn't have been missing out on anything. The results do seem to have had an affect on Facebook who are testing different ways to make Facebook accessible should Google get rid of them, but it also suggests that maybe this rivalry is going a little far and that Facebook might be, just a little bit, sketchy.
Rosina is a Songbird rookie with a degree in Creative Writing. She's trying to focus on her novel on the side but is hoping that Content Writing will turn out to be a good career choice in the mean time! Follow her @RosinaAtSMF
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Facebook Have Been Deliberately Crashing Their Android App
Reviewed by Unknown
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Thursday, January 07, 2016
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Reviewed by Unknown
on
Thursday, January 07, 2016
Rating:
Unknown
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