Tag: Facebook

Alex is back at it with another very well written and important post, this time focusing on the state of mobile browser choice and how each major contributor is undermining user choice.

The mobile web is a pale shadow of its potential because the vehicle of progress that has delivered consistent gains for two decades has silently been eroded to benefit native app platforms and developers. These attacks on the commons have at their core a shared disrespect for the sanctity of user choice, substituting the agenda of app and OS developers for mediation by a user’s champion.

Wonderful walk-through of just how much data you’re sharing when you do something as simple as pizza and a movie.

Facebook’s Free Basics—an app that provides people in certain countries around the world free access to a subset of the web—has never sat quite right to me, but I’ve never taken the time to dig in deeply myself.

Thankfully, it looks like the folks at Global Voices did. There’s a 36-page PDF report available detailing their findings, as well as several country-specific reports. Their key findings certainly don’t make me feel any better about the app:

Free Basics might not speak your language: Free Basics does not meet the linguistic needs of target users.

Free Basics features little local content, but plenty of corporate services from the US and UK.

Free Basics doesn’t connect you to the global internet – but it does collect your data…

Free Basics violates net neutrality principles: Free Basics does not allow users to browse the open Internet.

Global Voices research findings suggest that most of the content offered via Free Basics will not meet the most pressing needs of those who are not online, and that the data and content limitations built into Free Basics are largely artificial and primarily aimed at collecting profitable data from users.