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Oops — Facebook did it again: spying, cheating and playing fast and loose with privacy.

Apple says Team Zuckerberg grossly violated its trust with an app that lets the social media giant siphon users’ phone and web activity as a way for Facebook to spy on its competitors, TechCrunch reports.

A good chunk of the people who were paid up to $20 a month (plus referral fees) to install the privacy-obliterating app were teens. Facebook insists it got parental OKs for underage users; care to guess how many parents actually understood what was going on?

Apple says that installing the Facebook Research app on phones other than Facebook employees’ was a “clear breach of their agreement with Apple,” which is supposed to let Apple review any app before it’s released to the public.

As security expert Will Strafach told TechCrunch, the app gives Facebook “the ability to continuously collect the following types of data: private messages in social media apps, chats from instant messaging apps — including photos/videos sent to others, emails, web searches, web browsing activity, and even ongoing location information by tapping into the feeds of any location tracking apps you may have installed.”

Sounds about right: Facebook’s whole business model seems to revolve around spying.

What makes all this worse is that Facebook has time and again proven itself cavalier about protecting data. The latest proof came last month: Documents obtained by The New York Times showed that Facebook let 150-plus companies see the names of pretty much all of its users’ friends and other data, without consent.

It’s time Mark Zuckerberg finds a new way to leech off his “community.”

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