US, WASHINGTON (ORDO NEWS) — Facebook, in collaboration with four mobile operators, has launched the Discover service in Peru. The program, which can be installed on a computer or mobile device running Android OS, gives users free access to text versions of sites. At the same time, photo, audio and video content is not loaded.
Thanks to this approach, Discover provides an opportunity to save traffic and provide access to the Web to the largest possible number of low-income people. Currently, 10 megabytes of free traffic per day are available to residents of Peru in the program. As informs edition TechCrunch , this limit is not Facebook, and mobile operators – service partners.
In the future, the daily dose of traffic per person can be reviewed. According to Facebook representatives, they expect operators to agree to set a 20 megabyte limit when launching Discover in other countries. In addition, the possibility of downloading photos is being considered.
“During the public health crisis caused by the coronavirus, we believe it is especially important to explore ways to help people stay connected and increase access to medical information and other resources on the Internet,” says Yoav Zeevi, product manager for Facebook. “As part of our ongoing effort to ensure that people have access to accurate medical information, health and coronavirus resources will be available on the Discover homepage.”
Discover is far from Facebook’s only free internet initiative. The company is also developing the Internet.org project, which provides access to a limited number of web resources in 65 countries. The Express Wi-Fi program is already operating in India, which allows large traffic consumers to share the Internet.
Interestingly, Google and Wikimedia, which previously developed similar projects, are curtailing their initiatives on free access to the Web. So, in February of this year, the Google Station service, which provided free Internet access at 400 railway stations, stopped working in India. And the year before last, Wikimedia turned off the development of the Wikipedia Zero program, which allowed more than 800 million people to access the online encyclopedia in 72 countries for free.
Facebook is not always doing its best. So, in August last year, the company recognized that its employees secretly recorded and decrypted user conversations.
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