Some Reddit users who installed the Facebook Research VPN say they knew of its extensive data collection, but had little expectation of privacy to begin with
What the going rate for the hyper-invasive program tells us about the evolving understanding of our personal data's value.
Context & Ripple Effects
TechCrunch's investigation into the paid Facebook Research VPN landed two days before this piece; Slate's contribution is the user side — some Reddit participants say they read the disclosures and signed up anyway, because they never expected privacy on their phones. That reframes the program less as a leak than a transaction with a price tag.
The lineage matters: Facebook's earlier Onavo acquisition supplied app-usage data that reportedly shaped decisions like the WhatsApp purchase and Instagram Stories (per WSJ-sourced reporting), and it came after Cambridge Analytica had already put the company's data practices under scrutiny. Slate is asking what the going rate for this kind of access says about how users value their own data.
First-order effects
- Facebook gains a consent narrative for the Research program — paying participants who acknowledged the scope of collection blunts the 'users didn't know' framing that defined prior controversies.
Second-order effects
- The playbook outlives the backlash: BuzzFeed's later finding that Sensor Tower ran the same VPN-apps-as-data-collection scheme at scale shows other analytics firms treated the model as replicable rather than radioactive.
Third-order effects
- If users increasingly treat invasive collection as a priced trade-off rather than a violation, the battleground shifts from disclosure to compensation — pressuring platforms and regulators to define when 'informed consent plus payment' legitimizes surveillance-grade data gathering.
The trend: Consumer data harvesting is migrating from covert app-level collection toward explicitly paid, disclosed transactions — with the market price of personal data becoming the real story.