Social media giant — Facebook is in the process of testing a new app to expand internet access in developing countries. The new Discover app aims to provide Facebook users with free browsing data provided by several mobile partners that the company is dealing with. This may not be in your country yet as Facebook is doing its first trial in Peru, but it plans to launch in a number of other countries in the future, including Thailand, the Philippines, and Iraq.
Here is how it will work, users will receive free data from their provider each day and will get a notification when it’s available. Just like Facebook zero bundles that most developing nations and the discover app will also provide low-bandwidth browsing — so you can load text on a website but not video, audio, or other data-intensive elements. (If you want to stream, you can purchase additional data to do so.)
To enable people to browse the internet using free data, we route web traffic through the Discover app proxy and temporarily decrypt it to remove the video, audio, and other high-bandwidth content that is not supported. To support security, we encrypt information between our servers and any device that supports HTTPS where possible — even if the service being accessed runs only over HTTP. For websites that support HTTPS, a second certificate is used for traffic encrypted between our servers and the developers’.
The other merit of the Discover app is that users will don’t need a Facebook account to use it. Facebook also claims that the app doesn’t collect users’ browsing histories “in connection with them” and does not store their activity to target Facebook ads.
Discover appears to be a take two of Facebook’s Free Basics initiative, which aimed to provide internet access (and, perhaps, Facebook access) to regions with low connectivity. That service, which allowed subscribers on supported phones to visit select websites (including BBC News, Wikipedia, Bing — and, of course, Facebook and Messenger) without paying for the data usage. The Discover app, doesn’t discriminate between websites and would be more compliant with that standard.
The Discover app in now available in the Google Play Store (if the user has a SIM from a participating operator) or users can visit 0.discoverapp.com on any mobile web browser or download the Discover app for Android.
