Facebook Inc. will stop running unpaid user studies and shut down Onavo, a controversial app it has used to collect data on consumers’ online habits.

The move, first reported by TechCrunch on Thursday night, isn’t entirely surprising, given recent scrutiny over its market research practices.  Apple Inc. pulled the iOS version of Onavo from the App Store six months ago after finding that it had violated its privacy rules. Facebook has now removed the service from Google Play as well, though it will remain usable on existing users’ devices for a while still with the data collection features disabled.

Onavo is a virtual private network tool that makes it possible to access websites via an encrypted connection. Facebook offered the app at no charge in exchange for users giving it the right to monitor web traffic that passes through Onavo. The app tracked the amount of time consumers spent in apps and services, their location, what devices they used and related data.

Onavo is reported to have provided Facebook with some highly valuable competitive intelligence. Late last year, leaked documents revealed that the app had given the social network giant early insight into the growth and popularity of WhatsApp, which it acquired for $19 billion in 2013.

The final nail in the coffin for Onavo may not have been the ban from Apple, but rather the more recent controversy over Facebook’s market research practices. The company was last month revealed to have been secretly paying consumers — including some under 18 — to download  a research app that tracked everything from their emails to their browsing histories. The app was partially based on Onavo.

Apple temporarily curbed Facebook’s app distribution rights following the controversy in a move that took some of the company’s other internal apps offline as well. Still, the social networking giant said it plans to continue running paid research programs going forward, though it will stop inviting new users to the program involving the Onavo-based research app.

The decision to scale back user research comes as Facebook faces growing regulatory scrutiny. Last month, Germany banned the company from combining user data it collects on its own platforms with information gathered about consumers via outside services, such as websites that use the Facebook Pixel ad analytics plugin.

Photo: Unsplash