Facebook has gifted the world, especially those lacking high bandwidth internet connections, with Facebook Lite, a minimalist version of the privacy invading social networking app.
Facebook doesn’t think anyone, anywhere, should be able to escape its data slurp and has pared back its app to make sure it gets the data it needs while providing users a service that doesn’t consume all their minimally available bandwidth.
The company released the app yesterday which is under one megabyte, offers “core experiences like News Feed, status updates, photos, notifications and more” and “uses less data and works well across all network conditions.”
It will roll out to Asia first, then “parts of Latin America, Africa and Europe.”
But the company isn’t being altruistic here. The app pairs with Facebooks slimy Internet.org scheme, in which users are offered a Facebook curated, watered down, version of the internet instead of Facebook just providing them with download credits to use on any website they wish.
The latest app is a data grab, pure and simple. Facebook will tolerate a little less user engagement in order to get “the next billion” hooked. Once it has their data and has them using Facebook, it can then ramp up the ads and data-selling, all the way to the bank.
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