Meta accused of circumventing Apple’s restrictions on personal data sharing

Meta is the subject of new legal action in the United States: According to a complaint filed Wednesday, September 21 in federal court in San Francisco, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram is accused of secretly preparing tools to circumvent Apple’s ban on sharing the identity and interests of its users with partners. Since April 2021, iPhone app publishers must, in effect, request permission from each user before communicating their unique advertising ID to other services or companies.

This complaint is based on research by security consultant Felix Krause linked to google. in an article Published in August, the researcher noted the role played by the Internet browser of the Facebook and Instagram apps, which opens instead of the usual browser — like Safari or Chrome, for example — when a user clicks on a link directly in their thread. This in-app browser injects a small piece of computer code into each of the websites visited, as confirmed by Meta to the researcher.

According to him, this piece of code acts as a tracker and could theoretically allow Facebook and Instagram to track the identity of users from one site to another and record all their clicks on those sites. According to him, Facebook and Instagram are not the only social networks that use such injections: TikTok will too.

dead crazy

The complaint filed on Wednesday accuses Meta of being less cautious than Felix Krause, of not caring about terms, and of ensuring that the US group violated Apple’s rules. A Meta spokesperson said To Bloomberg News That these allegations ” Incorrect “ And the company will defend itself against it “Strongly”.

At the beginning of 2022, the US group said that Apple’s new measures could lead to this A decrease of 10 billion dollars (10.2 billion euros) of its advertising revenue. In 2021, Meta launched a file Etisalat campaign for against the Apple Company, arguing that these new restrictions would harm small businesses by preventing them from making their products known to consumers.