According to the complaint filed Wednesday, a small piece of spy code would allow Instagram and Facebook to track down the identity and behavior of their users on the Internet when they sail from these applications.
Le Monde
Meta is the subject of a new legal proceedings in the United States: according to a complaint filed on Wednesday September 21 before the Federal Court of San Francisco, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram is accused of having secretly put In place of the tools to bypass the prohibition made by Apple to share the identity and the interests of its users with partners. Since April 2021, application publishers intended for iPhone must, in fact, request the authorization of each user before communicating their unique advertising identifier to other services or companies.
This complaint is based on Felix Krause’s research, a safety consultant linked to Google . In an article published in August, the Checher notes the role played by the Internet browser specific to Facebook and Instagram applications, which Opens instead of the usual browser – like safari or chrome, for example – when the user clicks on a link directly in their wire. This browser integrated into the applications injects, in fact, a small piece of computer code in each of the websites visited, as meta confirmed to the researcher.
According to him, this piece of code plays the role of tracer and could theoretically allow Facebook and Instagram to follow the identity of users from one site to another and register each of their clicks on these sites. Facebook and Instagram are not, according to him, not the only social networks to use such code injections: Tiktok would also do it .
Meta Den
The complaint filed on Wednesday accuses Meta in a less careful way than Felix Krause, hardly taking hold of the conditional, and ensuring that the American group has well violated Apple’s rules. A spokesperson for Meta said to the Bloomberg news agency that these allegations were” baseless “and that the company was going Defend “vigorously”.
At the beginning of 2022, the American group said that the new Apple measures could lead to A decrease of 10 billion dollars (10.2 billion euros) of its advertising revenues. In 2021, Meta had launched a communication campaign against the apple firm, arguing that these new restrictions would harm small businesses by preventing them from making their products known to consumers.