According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, Facebook partners with mobile carriers in developing countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, and Pakistan to provide users with free access to Facebook and a few other websites, but users have been unknowingly charged by their cellular providers.
Free Basics is a service provided by Meta Connectivity (previously Facebook Connectivity) that claims to provide users with “free communication tools, health information, education resources, and other low-bandwidth services.” Since its beginning in 2013, the initiative has served more than 300 million people as of last October.
As per the Wall Street Journal, customers in Pakistan have been taxed the most ($1.9 million) for accessing Facebook’s “free” internet, with approximately two dozen other countries also affected.
Facebook’s software, User Interface (UI), and videos on the network appear to be the root of the problem. Videos are not intended to surface while using Free Basics, but faults in Facebook’s software allowed a couple to show up. Due to the difficulties, notifications informing users that they will be charged for watching the videos did not display.
In an internal report obtained by the WSJ, Facebook claims to have known for months that users were being charged for using Free Basics, and refers to the problem as “leakage,” which occurs when paid services overlap with what’s free. Because the majority of the program’s users have prepaid phone plans, many of them are unaware that they have been charged for accessing mobile data until they run out of money.
