Facebook Android app may hurt you and may not respect your privacy.
A little story about Facebook Android app…
Facebook has been launched in 2004 by the weel known Mark Zuckemberg and with the spread of the smartphones in 2010, he thought that he had to bring his social platform on mobiles too.
And he did in fact.
But how good did he do it?
You can have an answer to this question just by opening your Facebook Android app (who hasn’t installed it nowadays?) and using it.
Sure, now we are in 2017 and it may seem smooth and stable to you… do you know why?
You are probably using a multi-core smartphones with at least 2gb of RAM… which mobile app can’t run with such hardware?
The problem arose at the beginning.
Differently from iOS, in Android the app hasn’t been written in java (Android native language), but it just used html and some other kind of heavy parsing method.
In other words, was badly written.. and yes, we are talking about a billionaire society.
Just to not go in depth, this caused a great loss in performance and stability, and soon the Android facebook app lost its reputation.
This has been going on for some years, when they understood that they had to rewrite it from scratch.
But do you know how much juice does it drain from your beloved smartphone?
– A lot.
Not only energy but also useful memory and performance.
Is it possible that still today, a multi-billionaire company can’t optimize their own software?
Though it still has some negative aspects…
The situation improved, but still today in 2017, it lacks in many aspects, for example:
- Heaviness
- Bloat apps
- Messenger excluded
- Privacy
I’ll focus my attention on the privacy stuff.
Do you know how many permissions it requires?
This is just what you can find on their site, but when you install it they are many more, the scariest in the Other section.
And this one is a quite old pic that explains how privacy things changed during the past years… think how they got worse today…
Our humble opinion
- Device ID
- Phone status
- Reroute outgoing calls
- Make calls without your intervention
- Read sensitive data
Those are just some of the weirdest permissions, which it requires to run on your device, and honestly, does it seem to you more a social, or a spy app?
When you decide to install a social app, Facebook in particular, you can officially say goodbye to your privacy.
You have to be very careful when install stuff on your device, much more if you keep sensitive data on it.
We are in the internet era, we are all connected to each other and anyone can have the access to everyone, and if we esplicitly allow it, the things got even easier.
Lately we have heard about hacks, CIA hacking tools, Ransomware and so on, and this is not a case.
Social applications may be really enjoyable, funny, time wasting, but at the same time can harm you, silent as a ghost.
Yeah, I could have scared you, but this is the reality of facts.
Solutions?
Do not use the Facebook app.. even better do not stay on Facebook.
If you can’t live without your favourite social, you can install alternative apps just like
- Fast For Facebook
- Facebook Lite
- The old-but-gold browser
Conclusion
Do not waste your time on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp.. they are useful sometimes, I can’t deny it, but if you overuse them, you will waste not only your time, but your entire life.
