Meta devised an ingenious system (“localhost tracking”) that bypassed Android’s sandbox protections to identify you while browsing on your mobile phone — even if you used a VPN, the browser’s incognito mode, and refused or deleted cookies in every session.
This is the process through which Meta (Facebook/Instagram) managed to link what you do in your browser (for example, visiting a news site or an online store) with your real identity (your Facebook or Instagram account), even if you never logged into your account through the browser or anything like that.
Meta accomplishes this through two invisible channels that exchange information:
(i) The Facebook or Instagram app running in the background on your phone, even when you’re not using it.
(ii) Meta’s tracking scripts (the now-pulled illegal brainchild uncovered last week), which operate inside your mobile web browser.
I did a ‘download all your data’ on Facebook a while back and there wasn’t anything about my tracked browser history. Does this mean they’ve also violated the “users should be able to see the data you have on them” article of the GDPR as well?
I’m guessing they’re trying to hide behind weasel shit about the ids being anonymized or something as though it wasn’t trivially easy for them to deanonymize…