> Because of software problems at Facebook, which it has known about and failed to correct for months, people using the apps in free mode are getting unexpectedly charged by local cellular carriers for using data. In many cases they only discover this when their prepaid plans are drained of funds.<p>Seems like a breach of contract.
I suspect that Facebook has helped more people with their free internet initiatives than it has hurt regardless. It sucks some users got burnt due to leakage of paid traffic or bad communication/configuration/deal negotiation with carriers but those still seem to be just a fraction globally.<p>I'd be interested in seeing a more in-depth analysis of the total impact of the initiave to confirm though.
The lingo makes this sound a bit confusing to me.<p>In the Philippines, you get prepaid promos. Nobody calls them "plans" here. Some of the promos are slim, like you might get 100MB or less of data along with texting.<p>Getting "charged" also sounds strange, because you don't get charges. You just use up your data and then you can no longer browse. But that's not quite true. If your data is gone, then you can still use Free Facebook. I always assumed that was the point of using Free Facebook. You don't use it when you have data, you only use it when your data is gone. But I guess there are people who are super conserving their data.<p>Free Facebook sucks, because you can't see images. I guess it sucks worse when Facebook is unexpectedly using up your data. I LOVE it because it's far less distracting.<p>Facebook isn't the only quirky service here. Many of the promos also give you a certain amount of data for YouTube. I found that the service I use just allows all Google data through. With YouTube data, I can still use Google and check Gmail. So, when I'm feeling cheap, I just proxy my connection through an instance on Google Compute, which I had already been using for other purposes.
How much would it cost to make things right and provide full unrestricted broadband to both counties? It would go a long way to restore their image. Instead of old Google's "do no evil" adopting "make it right" would restore a lot of public faith.<p>There once was a person who worked to place land mines as part of their job for the khmer rouge, they spent their life trying to remove them. It didn't fix the initial destruction but it helped to set right some of the damage.
likely the original article: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-free-india-data-charges-11643035284" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-free-india-data-charge...</a>
The prevalance of whatsapp in latin america is because of this.<p>I remember seeing ads all over the place where I live here for 'WHATSAPP GRATIS!!!' 'FACEBOOK GRATIS!!!' everywhere from cellphone providers like movistar and claro... haha yeah great thanks for that like 5 years ago now what do we have? Oh some kind of dystopian schizophrenic nightmare? Thanks mark! FUCKING GRINGO<p>The amount of damage it's done to our society is immesurable. Ineffably bad. Unspeakable in the enormity of how horribly awful the consequences have been and continue to be when we all know our conversations are being monetized.
I guess it wasn't news to me. They did that exact thing to 0.facebook when Facebook was the hot new nerdy thing 10 years ago at my area. I would keep my prepaid in at the lowest denomination of currency possible (think 0.01) to be able to browse 0.fb since it charged for my browsing even though it was supposed to be free.<p>Overall I find it actually suprisingly usable, which is a habit that I more or less carried until the "modern" times where I browse Facebook on my Android Firefox instead using the bloated app and Messenger.
I’m somewhat disappointed that most of the comments in this thread take the form of:<p>“anything that Facebook does is bad even if it helps people” and “poorer people are better off in the dark than using anything Facebook made”<p>Having some form of internet is clearly better than none at all and criticizing efforts to expand internet access should at least come with some viable alternative.<p>Applying first world values like data security and privacy to third world farmers just shows a total lack of empathy.
Data colonialism is bad enough on these poor people. I see a future world divided into data literate privileged people who can secure their privacy and those who are colonialized and exploited.
Facebook tried to pull this shit in India too. Didn't work out. A lot of Facebook execs wrote Twitter posts about how India "threw out the capitalist baby with the colonial bathwater". Believe it or not those were the exact words.