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[Updated]: Over 1.5 lakh Indians’ data collected by Facebook Research app that was shot down by Apple

Of the 187,000 users on whom Facebook collected personal and sensitive device data via the now-defunct Facebook Research app, 156,000 are Indian users. This was revealed in a TechCrunch report. The data included all of a user's phone and web activity, across all apps, including search history, browsing habits, and content of unencrypted messages. In a March letter to Senator Richard Blumenthal’s office that TechCrunch got access to (available here), Facebook said that since 2016, it had collected data on 31,000 users in the US, including 4,300 teenagers. The remaining 156,000 users are from India, of which 29,700 users were minors, aged between 13 and 17 years old. In response to queries from MediaNama, Facebook said, "We ended the Facebook Research App program earlier this year. We have deleted all user-level market insights data that was collected from the app." Following were the questions we sent, but did not get specific answers to: How many of the 156,000 Indians affected were minors, that is, under 18 years old? Why were 5x more Indians targeted by the app than Americans? How did the company evaluate minor's permissions to give up their data? Was parental consent required? If yes, in what form? What kind of data on Indians was collected by the company using Facebook Research? Did Facebook have access to encrypted WhatsApp messages using the Facebook Research app? What all did this data ["all user-level market insights data"] include? Did it include content of WhatsApp messages? Has the aggregated data, not…

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