Meta(Facebook) and Yandex apps silently de-anonymize users’ browsing habits without consent.
Meta(Facebook) and Yandex apps silently de-anonymize users’ browsing habits without consent.
An international research collaboration discovered a potential privacy abuse involving Meta and Yandex bridging persistent identifiers to browsing histories. Native Android apps, such as Facebook or Instagram, silently listen on fixed local ports.
This kind of cross-platform tracking is unprecedented - and it’s especially surprising coming from two companies that serve billions of users worldwide
Is anyone surprised by this? Their entire business model is based on tracking people so of course they'll want to de-anonymize users.
If you are using facebook at this point, you deserve anything that happens.
and it’s especially surprising coming from two companies that serve billions of users worldwide
I mean, deanonymization and data-mining costs are gonna be R&D, so they're a fixed cost that doesn't really scale up with the size of the userbase, so it makes more sense, financially, for a company with a larger userbase to be putting resources into it.
One could say it's their fiduciary duty.