Apple this week revoked Facebook’s developer certificate, effectively disrupting internal operations at Facebook and making its employees to suffer. Apple did this after finding out through a news report published by TechCrunch that Facebook was paying people in order to spy on their phone habits via a downloaded app.
Apple revoked the app’s certificate because Facebook obviously violated the terms of program by paying people in order to monitor their data and phone habits.
As soon as Apple revoked the certificate used by the Facebook’s app, thousands of Facebook employees became directionless because the revoked certificate also powered many internal apps used by employees for work. The development effectively disrupted the social media giant’s internal operations for nearly three days until Apple restored the certificate on Thursday.
Following the reinstatement of the certificate, Facebook’s internal operations continue to run haphazardly. But the company is restoring backup for some of the commonly used employee apps such as Facebook, Messenger, Workplace, Work Chat, Instagram and Mobile Home.
“We have had our Enterprise Certification, which enables our internal employee applications, restored,” a Facebook spokesperson said on Friday. “We are in the process of getting our internal apps up and running. To be clear, this didn’t have an impact on our consumer-facing services.”
Pedro Canahuati, a Facebook senior executive, revealed that the social media giant did not breach the policies of the agreement with Apple by paying people to know their phone habits. According to him, it is standard procedure to pay people to participate in market research, and that is the most efficient way to obtain industry data from iOS and Android closed ecosystems.
Considering that aggrieved Facebook employees earlier expressed disappointment with fellow colleagues working on the research app for the outage, and even accused Apple of an attack on the company, Canahuati released a memo to internal staffs.
In the lengthy memo, Canahuati stated that contrary to what Apply thought, Facebook would never put their relationship at risk intentionally for the “Project Atlas”. He also explained that Facebook Research app collected paid users’ data such as watch time, video duration and message length; but did not access or read users’ private messages, video content, stories, photos and even financial or health data.
