Reports have been made that the social network deliberately sabotaged its own application to test user loyalty.
Facebook has now been accused of deliberately crashing its own mobile app as a part of a test of its user patience and loyalty so they can better understand how dedicated people are to the social network.
This isn’t the first time the social media platform has been involved in psychological testing of its users.
The accusation came in the form of a report published in The Information entitled “Facebook’s Android Contingency Planning.” The report stated that the social network was “testing how addicted Android phone users are to Facebook apps and making sure they can quickly download them directly from Facebook rather than through Google Play.” The publication said their source was an individual who was familiar with that specific experiment.
The suggestion in the report was that plans were being made in case the mobile app was taken down from Google Play.
Within the report, it said that “artificial errors” were deliberately introduced into the smartphone application which would cause it to crash “for hours at a time.” It claimed that the reason the test was being conducted was in order to “prepar[e] for the eventuality that it leaves the Google Play app store.”
As a part of this, the social network deliberately crashed their mobile application for some of its users, off-and-on, over a span of a number of weeks. The goal was to measure whether or not those individuals would prefer to visit the mobile website or whether they would simply give up on using Facebook. What they found was that users were, indeed, willing to use the mobile site instead of abandoning their use of that social network.
Allegedly, this entire psychological experiment on Facebook users was to find out whether or not users were addicted enough to the social network that they would continue to use the platform even if the mobile app were to face difficulties or even be removed from the Google Play Store. At the time of the writing of this article, Facebook had not yet made any official statements with regards to this accusation.
The Canadian handset manufacturer had said it would step out of the country before revealing its customer data.
BlackBerry has now announced that it will be continuing its operations in Pakistan after the government of that country agreed to withdraw its demands that would require the company to hand over access to all its customer data.
The smartphone maker had developed a plan to leave Pakistan if the government continued the requirement.
Chief operating officer of BlackBerry, Marty Beard, explained in a blog post that the Pakistani government had now taken back its previous order to shut down the company’s services after the company and the government were able to complete “productive discussions”. The shutdown order was originally issued by the Pakistani government back in July 2015 when it said that “security reasons” were behind its decision. A few months later, on November 30, BlackBerry announced its decision to leave the country because it was unwilling to provide access to private customer information to the government.
The Pakistani government had demanded a vast range of backdoor access to BlackBerry customer information.
Among the information that the company would have been required to hand over included access to BBM chats and BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) emails. The smartphone manufacturer said this was “a compromise we are not willing to make.” The initial order from the government was that the company would have to shut down on November 30. However, that deadline was extended to December 30.
According to the company, there are up to 5,000 BES customers currently in Pakistan. It reported through Beard’s blog post that the authorities in Pakistan yielded to the resistance the company had placed against the demands for access to customer information and records. He wrote that “We are grateful to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority and the Pakistani government for accepting BlackBerry’s position that we cannot provide the content of our customers’ BES traffic, nor will we provide access to our BES servers.”
BlackBerry has not always been as driven or successful in the face of requirements from other national governments for access to user data. For example, in 2013, it gave access to the Indian government. It was able to view emails, BBM chats and internet service customer browsing habits. Reportedly, the company has also established data sharing agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Russia.
