Privacy: Does Meta Care About Apple?
A year ago, Apple introduced the privacy update to iOS which made it harder for apps to track user behavior, but two class actions argue that Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) continues to track user activity. online users even when they ask not to be tracked
Meta sued for bypassing Apple's anti-tracking system that allows users to deny data for advertising.
Two class actions in the United States accuse the parent company of Facebook and Instagram of evading the anti-user tracking system put in place by Apple over a year ago.
Apple introduced the Tracking Transparency App with an iOS operating system update in April 2021 . The feature allows users to decide whether to allow apps to monitor their activity "on other companies' apps and websites" for advertising purposes. The Cupertino giant's plan has pleased privacy advocates, but has left mobile app developers, ad tech companies, and rivals ( Facebook in particular ) very irritated.
Meta (still Facebook at the time) had heavily criticized Apple on the transparency of app tracking, claiming that it presents "a false compromise between personalized ads and privacy". The new option could have a negative impact on Facebook's ad business. In fact, if the user denies his consent, the apps are not authorized to track the activities of that user on the web. With the consequence that advertisements are less effective and less profitable. If we choose not to let Facebook track us, it will be harder for the company to see what we are buying or doing within other apps. And this will make it harder for businesses to target us with targeted ads.
According to a report published in February by the Wall Street Journal , Apple's introduction of the feature will negatively impact Meta's revenue of $ 10 billion this year.
The class action proposals – as Bloomberg reports – have been filed in the San Francisco federal court in the past two weeks.
All the details.
THE ACCUSATION OF THE COMPLAINTS
According to the indictment, Meta circumvented Apple's new restrictions by monitoring users via Facebook's in-app browser, which opens links within the app.
For the plaintiffs, the group led by Mark Zuckerberg is not only violating Apple's policies, it is also violating state and federal privacy laws, including the Wiretap Act, which made it illegal to intercept electronic communications without consent.
THE TRACKING OF FACEBOOK
In practice, for prosecution even when users do not consent to be tracked, Meta tracks Facebook users' online activity and communications with external third-party websites by injecting JavaScript code into those sites. When users click on a link within the Facebook app, Meta automatically directs them to the in-app browser it is tracking instead of the smartphone's default browser, without telling users that this is happening or that they are being tracked.
The class actions started from the analysis of the researcher Felix Krause who would have discovered how Meta still tracks users with alternative methods placed on third-party websites.
THE DEFENSE OF GOAL
But Meta strongly rejected the accusations.
A company spokesperson said the allegations are "baseless" and the company will defend itself. "We have designed our in-app browser to respect user privacy choices, including how data may be used for ads," the company added in an emailed statement to Bloomberg and Techcrunch .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/privacy-meta-frega-apple/ on Wed, 28 Sep 2022 07:42:15 +0000.