Even though Apple has enhanced its iOS to stop sneaky apps including Facebook and Meta from collecting users’ data without their consent, a new report has it that the Meta-owned platforms have been using a sneaky loophole to collect users’ data.
This has therefore prompted a new lawsuit against the social media giant.
According to the lawsuits, Meta is alleged to have been injecting JavaScript tracking code into websites that user visits via the in-app browsers of Facebook and Instagram for iOS without users’ permission.
It’s absurd considering the fact that Apple rolled out a privacy policy in 2021 called the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) which requires app developers to ask users if their data can be tracked.
- Advertisement -
This in fact led to Meta going on a full-blown campaign trying to convince users to allow its apps to track their data because it’s good for small businesses who are running personalized ads. However, the campaign was met with strong opposition from internet users.
The change made by Apple cost tech companies billions of dollars with Meta losing about US$10 billion in 2022 according to a report.
As mentioned above, tech companies are able to target their ads at users by monitoring their footsteps across the internet. This helps them profile every user and in return make big bucks at the end of it all.
Meta has reportedly broken the privacy policy which is the cause of the lawsuits.
In August, security researcher Felix Krause published a blog post titled “Instagram and Facebook can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser,” and shared his discovery, along with what it meant.
“This allows Instagram to monitor everything happening on external websites, without the consent from the user, nor the website provider,” Kraus wrote.
Krause also explained in a tweet thread this past month that he submitted the issue to Meta about 9 weeks before publishing his research because he didn’t hear back from them.
Since his research went viral, Meta reached out to the researcher in mid-August with the claim that their system is in line with the user’s ATT choice.
Meta says the claims in the lawsuit are “without merit,” according to a statement the company provided to Bloomberg. Facebook and Instagram’s parent company maintains that it “designed its in-app browser to respect users’ privacy choices.”
