Facebook struggles with angry employees after Apple bans its internal apps

It’s not just the users, critics and privacy experts who are angry with Facebook , the emotion is now whirling inside the organisation too. After Apple revoked the developer certificate that Facebook was using to power its “research” apps — that was taking complete access of iPhones of users as young as 13-years in exchange for $20 a month — tension immediately escalated within the Facebook office too. The same certificate that authenticated the Facebook Research app was also used in the key internal Facebook apps that the company’s thousands of employees used every day. These internal apps having gone dark hasn’t gone down too well with Facebook employees. [caption id=“attachment_5400001” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg listens to French President Emmanuel Macron after a family picture with guests of the “Tech for Good Summit” at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, May 23, 2018. REUTERS/Charles Platiau/Pool[/caption] According to a report by Business Insider, due to the ban, Facebook employees are unable to communicate with their colleagues, access internal information, and even catch company transportation. “This is probably one of the worse things that can happen to the company internally,” an employee told the publication. To do some damage control with the angry employees, the company executive has reportedly issued a memo saying that the systems will be up and running again shortly. In the meanwhile, the staff has been asked to install the public version of the apps that are available. Though few of the apps that Facebook employees use like the one for transportation and one that has the employee information are not available publicly, so they’re totally unavailable for now. This incident is extremely shocking considering the company’s approach to privacy does not look to be reshaping even a little bit, especially in the light of the recent scandal. An employee rightly pointed out on Workplace saying that if the  Onavo Protect app was pulled down from the App Store for the same reason last year, what made the company think it was alright to continue a similar project via an Apple Enterprise certificate?