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Meta found 'covertly tracking' Android users through Instagram and Facebook
- gnabgib 1y agoDiscussion (447 points, 1 day ago, 302 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115
- dang 1y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Covert web-to-app tracking via localhost on Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115 - June 2025 (308 comments) Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175940 - June 2025 (26 comments)
- sherdil2022 1y agoWhy do companies still risk doing these kinds of things anymore? Externally we have some amazing security researchers who look out and dig these things out - and try to hold the companies responsible. And what is the internal process? Wouldn't these intrusive and privacy violating features (to track users for ex) be captured in design docs, emails, chats, code changes/PRs - and up for discovery? Aren't employees saying anything against these features? What culture are they building? What leadership are they demonstrating? It can't all be about money by any cost damn the users and their privacy/rights, right?
- neepi 1y agoIt’s because they are assholes and think they can get away with it. There’s no other reason. Now imagine what would happen without any regulation at all…
- yua_mikami 1y agoSadly they do get away with it.
- dylan604 1y agoThere is no thinking. They do get away with it. Why are you trying to tap dance around this?
- neepi 1y agoWell I have some hope in time that they stop getting away with it and are punished for getting away with it for a long time.
- SoftTalker 1y agoBusinesses move faster than regulation. Not that we give up on regulation, but the problem is deeper. As John Adams wrote: We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
- yencabulator 1y agoNah that's just poor regulation. Try telling a Nordic judge that what you did was technically not illegal, you'll find you're still liable. It's all about intent and spirit of the law vs letter of the law.
- Hilift 1y ago$70 billion per year net profit. Basically printing money at this point.
- spencerflem 1y ago"It can't all be about money by any cost damn the users and their privacy/rights, right?" As far as I can tell, that's the mandate.
- amelius 1y agoAt this point I want to see some physical wrist slapping. Select some wronged user and invite them to slap Zuck's wrists with a wooden stick and put it on YouTube. This will be more satisfactory than the fines which are just the cost of doing business.
- i80and 1y ago> Aren't employees saying anything against these features? Likely, but it's just demoralized workplace grousing. Tech employees are statistically sycophantic, and the exceptions get burned out or tossed out by executives who say things like "why don't they just shut up and work"
- SoftTalker 1y agoAnd people have done way worse than this, at the behest of their leaders, without pushback. Most people are followers.
- djaychela 1y ago> Most people are followers. And the tech industry leaders are mostly spoiled, entitled mill/billionaires who eject anyone who crosses them. A team of moral imbeciles. Society is screwed until Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk et al are stripped of their power and wealth. Which will never happen.
- burningChrome 1y agoCompanies also have their executives do things like tell you that they only use data ethically and responsibly, then turn around and sell it to the highest bidder. A lot of times unless you're on a team or in a department that's doing this stuff for nefarious purposes, you wouldn't know. Anecdotal evidence: I worked in RPA (robotic process automation) for a large software company. We were tasked with automating a decision process. The decision process was completely benign. Something like a payments process. Pretty easy. We finished it in a few months start to finish. We hand it off, it goes into production. A lot of back slapping and high fives happen. I go on with my work, move out of the company a few months later. About a year later, a guy I worked with at the company emails me a news story about a company using the RPA program we built to auto deny insurance claims for their clients. Massive class action lawsuit. The insurance company had taken our script and just re-purposed it to auto deny a certain percentage of claims. I was shocked and dismayed that someone would use the stuff we built for their own shady business practices. It was a huge wakeup call that even when you're building something completely benign, a company can pay millions for it and reuse it to do bad things to people and you'll never know until its too late.
- pengaru 1y agocompanies are composed of people people are usually motivated by more and faster this means whatever opportunities present themselves for short-term more and faster will have no shortage of takers TL;DR myopic greed
- spencerflem 1y agoI don't think people even are, in general. Most people I meet are very nice and feel a little weird about their employer. Companies are something else beyond people, which has a mind of its own. And leadership selects for sociopathy.
- pengaru 1y agoWhen you get to a company the size of which we're speaking, there are always takers for the short-term enrich-myself options. It's really not that complicated, if I squint hard enough it looks like an obvious tragedy of the commons variant.
- spencerflem 1y agoNo totally, but I don't think most people are like that. 20% maybe? Enough to easily fill every slot but I hate blaming people in general, y'know?
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoCan we not treat it as axiomatic by now that there is little to no risk of accountability from either the law or from undiscerning end users?
- svachalek 1y agoIt's been clear for a long time what Meta is about. Anyone working there has long ago compromised any feelings they have for it in exchange for a paycheck. And it seems sucking up to whatever political powers are winning today has served to keep them out of governmental interference.
- wyldberry 1y agoThe more well compensated someone is, the less likely they are going to be to speak out. The employees are more than comfortable. Also, the incentive structure for reward (stock price etc) is predicated by squeezing every last bit of monetization out. They already know ahead of time how much money a new feature could bring in, and the potential litigation cost before hand. If revenue > litigation/fine expense, they are going to do it.
- altcognito 1y agoFrankly because if we had real consequences, Mark Zuckerberg would have been in jail for "accidentally" letting Cambridge Analytica scrape their data "unknowingly". Or he would have faced consequences at Harvard for scraping user data. He's obviously not the only one, but absolutely one of the higher profile cases.
- bobek 1y agoWell, it is the same as all those examples of people "just doing their jobs" in concentration camps. Being compliant, focused on execution of their ~orders~ process. Interestingly, many people are being pre-emptively harsher, than required/requested. Checkout "Those Who Said No" (DOI 10.2307/1429971).
- joshstrange 1y ago> Why do companies still risk doing these kinds of things anymore? Money > Externally we have some amazing security researchers who look out and dig these things out - and try to hold the companies responsible. At worst they get some bad PR but most people aren't listening to security researchers (or don't care). Companies aren't being held "responsible" for anything, maybe a small fine but that's just the cost of doing business. > And what is the internal process? Wouldn't these intrusive and privacy violating features (to track users for ex) be captured in design docs, emails, chats, code changes/PRs - and up for discovery? Yes, probably all these things exist. See also Apple talking about how to make linking-out sound as scary as possible. There are chats with employees brainstorming how to make it scarier to end-users to drive them back into the IAP flow. > Aren't employees saying anything against these features? Some are afraid of losing their job or getting branded as a non-team-player. Some don't care. It can be easy to get lost in "implement the spec" instead of "is what I'm building morally ok?" > What culture are they building? A bad one. > What leadership are they demonstrating? That they only care about money and what they can get away with. Even if they get caught the profits outstrip the fine by a large margin. "It's just numbers/business". > It can't all be about money by any cost damn the users and their privacy/rights, right? It is.
- sneak 1y agoThis might apply here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obedience_to_Authority:_An_Experimental_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obedience_to_Authority:_An_Exp... I recommend reading the book, it has a ton of useful stuff in it beyond what everyone knows about the Milgram experiment.
- kfkdjajgjic 1y agoif (cookies.accepted) { trackUser(); } else { trackUserAnyway(); }
- esalman 1y agoelse { trackUserCovertly(); }
- benbristow 1y agoif (cookies.accepted) { trackUser(); } else { isAbTestEnabled() ? trackUserCovertly() : trackUserAnyway(); }
- elpakal 1y agosimplify if (true) { trackUser(); }
- crisnoble 1y agotrackUser();
- tobyjsullivan 1y agolgtm. Ship it
- elpakal 1y agotrackUser()
- thinkingemote 1y agoI recently looked at how websites handled these simple "accept cookies" buttons - turns out lots of them did them like your example but more like {trackUser(); } else {trackUser(); } The only effect was to close the popup. Even some (most?) off the shelf cookie consent libraries don't handle the turning the actual cookies off.
- john01dav 1y agoIs this a violation of the computer fraud and abuse act? It seems to me like it might be because they're literally breaking out of a sandbox and viewing data from other apps. Other cases of that (like breaking out of VMs on a cloud provider) are clear violations. Sometimes people see violations of the law by a big corporation against people as less bad than when a single person does the same thing, but that's unreasonable -- if anything the former is more harmful due to potential for scale.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- spencerflem 1y agoI'm with you fwiw. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a conviction.
- gleenn 1y agoWhy is this de-facto the case for so many things? Is it a matter of finding a lawyer? Do these enforcement agencies just not care or don't have enough resources to battle Meta? It's exhausting that this gets repeated so often but for no apparent reason. I understand that the fine might not be large enough to stop them but it feels like all these things just get swept under the rug and gross violations of privacy which are against the law never get actioned. (Edit: forgot a word)
- rgreek42 1y agoThere's only one law in America: capital accumulation shall not be impeded.
- jrs235 1y agoThis administration is more interested in using executive agencies to advance a political power consolidating agenda not protecting consumers and citizens from corporate abuse and villains of privacy. Mega corporations and government (US Executive branch) are getting in bed and partnering to exploit data to maintain and expand power and control. Where and when the US Constitution protects citizens and prevents the government from doing an action, the government will lean on mega corporations to enforce their policy in the private sector. Social credit, like communist China na, is coming to the US. While the GOP has been resurrecting McCarthyism, they have been stoking the fears to make them a reality. Projection at it's finest. The hypocrisy is mind blowing and the cognitive dissonance in those that way up the FUD extremely strong and empowering for the malicious "elites" using it.
- asliejrtalwijr 1y ago[flagged]
- jpm_sd 1y agoMore details https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-06-03/the-covert-method-meta-uses-to-track-mobile-browsing-without-consent-even-in-incognito-mode-or-with-a-vpn.html https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-06-03/the-covert-... https://localmess.github.io/ https://localmess.github.io/
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- GiorgioG 1y agoI deleted Facebook and Instagram from my iPhone two weeks ago. I'm done getting ads about something my wife and I were discussing just a little while ago (verbal conversation.) That's not targeting, that's an invasion of privacy. Fuck you Meta.
- soperj 1y agowhat about whatsapp?
- KingOfCoders 1y agoCan't, my mum only uses WA.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoI feel you king of coders
- ath3nd 1y agoMove her on Signal
- GiorgioG 1y agoDon't use WhatsApp.
- ohlookcake 1y ago"I'm getting Facebook ads for something we were just talking about verbally so it must be listening in" has been debunked time and again. Any combination of other browsing based inference, baader meinhof, and pure coincidence would be at play
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175940
- Johnny555 1y ago>Google, which owns the Android operating system, confirmed the covert activity to Sky News. >It said Meta and Yandex used Android's capabilities "in unintended ways that blatantly violate our security and privacy principles". Did Google immediately remove these apps with blatant security and privacy violations from their app store? I wish there was a way to prevent an app from running in the background.
- SoftTalker 1y ago> I wish there was a way to prevent an app from running in the background. Uninstall the app.
- Johnny555 1y agoThat only works for apps I don't need or want. But there are some apps on my phone that I want, but I don't really need them to be active in the background only when I'm using them.
- energy123 1y agoTime to start imprisoning execs
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- KingOfCoders 1y agoAs long as CEOs don't go to jail, this will not stop. CEO MANIFESTO Do illegal thing, increase revenue, bonus for me, if caught, punishment for the company.
- bdangubic 1y ago… without the punishment part
- teaearlgraycold 1y agoWhat do you mean? They paid the $10,000 fine on their millions in illegal profits. Lesson learned.
- bdangubic 1y agos/millions/billions
- someothherguyy 1y agoNot enough anyway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
- ethagnawl 1y agoIf you must use these services, use their websites. The UX is diminished but, at least for me, that's a benefit because it results in me using them less.
- qingcharles 1y agoProblem with a lot services these days is that the website might offer only a tiny fraction of the functionality of the mobile app. Does anyone know a sane way to monitor the API calls from an Android app so I can see the endpoints that aren't available on the web apps?
- iammrpayments 1y agoI have no idea how that meta is so successful, managing ads in their business dashboard is such a painful experience that I gave up testing new ads after a while. They also keep trying to push features designed to make you spend more money once your ad is running and their “representatives” will keep calling you with “strategies” but 99% of the time they have 0 idea on how it works. If your account gets banned good luck finding a real human being who can solve your issue.
- pier25 1y agoA couple of months ago I spent like $25 in a campaign for a small product I launched. It translated into literally zero real traffic let alone sales. I got likes from what looked like bot accounts from random countries (Kazahstan etc) even when I was quite certain I had limited the ads to certain countries. Then I was spammed with scams on the ads dashboard who appeared out of nowhere. Absolute waste of money.
- radicalbyte 1y agoFacebook install a rootkit on many Androids which had the ability to send all of you debug-level system logging to Facebook. Even if you never installed their shit. That data can be used to track everything you do on your phone. We found this out (I was the first to recreate / prove it) when testing the COVID contact tracing apps in NL, at the time Google were logging the seeds to the main system log. That allowed anyone with access to said logs to build a real-time map of ever Android user in the world who had the GAEN framework installed. EDIT: Here's the press release in English covering the app shutdown: https://nltimes.nl/2021/04/29/coronamelder-app-taken-offline-data-leak-investigation https://nltimes.nl/2021/04/29/coronamelder-app-taken-offline... Here's a paper detailing Facebook's access infecting systems with no Facebook installed: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.02713 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.02713
- abeyer 1y agoI suppose your proof just didn't fit in the margin?
- radicalbyte 1y agoHere proof that we shut the app down whilst the issue was being fixed, in English. There are more details in Dutch including the letters to Parliament we had to make covering the details. If you're Dutch use Google. https://nltimes.nl/2021/04/29/coronamelder-app-taken-offline-data-leak-investigation https://nltimes.nl/2021/04/29/coronamelder-app-taken-offline... Here's the paper showing the Facebook had access to the logging and whole range of very suspect permissions: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.02713 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.02713
- threecheese 1y agoIs this still in place? I’ve skimmed the paper: is the assertion that major hardware vendors are shipping Android devices with pre installed (sometimes non public) libraries (from Meta for example), which have wide data access permissions including potentially the ability to decrypt sensitive wire/rest data (via certs)? And they are still doing this???
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- runevault 1y agoThis type of thing is exactly why I don't go installing apps from every company that wants me to put something on my phone to get "reward points" or the like. Security is never perfect and they clearly want additional data, why else bother with the phone app?
- bigbadfeline 1y agoForget apps, your major browser allows anybody with js on the page you're visiting to open ports on your local network. That capability was used by these trackers but it's a horrendous security breach on its own.
- qingcharles 1y agoA neighbor needed me to fix something on his phone the other day and I noticed he was getting full-screen ads every minute that would appear over everything.. you couldn't hang up a call, call 911, send a text, nothing. I tracked it down to an app he had called "7 Min Workouts" which was spamming the ads. Wild.
- qnleigh 1y agoDo we know how these apps were able to track browser activity? The only clues I see in the article are that it was on a per-website basis, and that it worked in incognito mode. I'm especially curious if Google shares any of the blame. Was this a known issue and they assumed no one would actually exploit it, or a subtle bug that only just got caught? Either way it's a huge security vulnerability.
- paxys 1y agoUsing analytics scripts that website owners injected into the page. It's just that rather than uploading the collected data to facebook.com the script sent it to localhost:5678, and the Facebook app was listening on that port.
- gusfoo 1y ago> Do we know how these apps were able to track browser activity? The only clues I see in the article are that it was on a per-website basis, and that it worked in incognito mode. The App listens on localhost:xxyyzz when backgrounded. You open your browser and go to onesite.com and then differentsite.com the ID you are known as on those two sites is transmitted by having the JS on each site that supports Facebook functionality / ads etc for that site, and runs in your browser, make a request for an asset on your localhost with args <your ID on that website>. The app gets the args, and sends it off to HQ. That ties your signed-in account on the app to your activity on all the websites that was using this. And to be clear, FB Pixel calls are tagged with the 'event' that you're doing like "checkout" "just looking" "donate" etc. While I don't know for sure, I'd assume that the fact you're in Incognito Mode is just an aspect of the data report, I would say. Nothing would stop it.
- m463 1y agothis kind of stuff is everywhere. ios does the same thing. when you install an app, they allow deep linking of their urls. for example, if you install the amazon app, any amazon link loaded on your phone can be intercepted by it (messages, mail, browser, etc) I think the same kinds of things can be done with location services. A store app can do fine-grained bluetooth location with ibeacons in their store. I don't know the state-of-the-art in cross-application tracking. I'm pretty sure sdks added to multiple apps can do the same sort of thing. At some point a number of years ago, i just stopped installing apps.
- tortilla 1y agoHow would you explain this to the layperson or normie? It’s like Meta giving every AirBnB host a free toaster as a gift — but secretly, the toaster has a hidden microphone and internet connection that listens in on every guest’s conversation, then beams that info back to Meta.
- yencabulator 1y agoYour phone's web browser lets any website talk to the apps on your phone. The app knows who you are, and Facebook tracking is on practically all websites, so Zuck tracks you on all websites, even in Incognito mode.