AAPL Apple Inc

By Georgia Wells 

Facebook Inc. is shutting down its Onavo app that tracks user behavior, a sign the social-media titan is rethinking how it collects information about users amid widespread privacy concerns.

Facebook said on Thursday it would be removing Onavo from the Google Play store, and plans to eventually shut down the app entirely. Apple Inc. pulled the Onavo app from its App Store in August for violating its data-collection policies.

Facebook is facing scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators across the world about the extent to which consumers understand how Facebook collects information about people on the internet. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps, often without prominent or specific disclosure.

Onavo is a particularly stark example of Facebook's desire to learn more about consumers because it gives the site insight into people's activity on apps that don't belong to Facebook and provides intelligence about rival firms. In 2014, Facebook used Onavo data to inform its $22 billion purchase of the messaging service WhatsApp.

Users download Onavo to encrypt their internet traffic; the app also redirects users' traffic to Facebook's servers so that Facebook can log the action in a database to determine which apps people generally are using, how frequently and for how long. Millions of people have downloaded the app.

Facebook also said it would no longer conduct unpaid market research of the sort Onavo enabled.

"We are shifting our focus to reward-based market research," a spokeswoman for Facebook said in a statement.

News of Facebook's decision to close Onavo was reported earlier by industry news site TechCrunch. TechCrunch had also previously reported on Facebook's efforts to pay users for information about their online behavior as recorded by Onavo.

Write to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 22, 2019 15:09 ET (20:09 GMT)

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