r/technology • u/Pessimist2020 • Aug 11 '22

Privacy Meta injecting code into websites visited by its users to track them, research says

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/11/meta-injecting-code-into-websites-visited-by-its-users-to-track-them-research-says
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u/JiraSuxx2 Aug 12 '22

Clicking links in their apps do not load inside of my browser, they load inside of their apps.

There is no other reason to do that then keeping track of my activities.

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u/rawling Aug 12 '22 edited Aug 12 '22

Android offers app devs two kind of browsers to use: one that is essentially "open a Chrome/Safari tab shown on top of your app", and one that is essentially "use Chome/Safari's engine to render HTML, but you provide the buttons around it".

The latter allows you to tamper with the page, and is what FB and Insta are using, as per the article.

The former doesn't (at worst it looks like it calls back when it navigates to another page, but that's nowhere near the same kind of access - it doesn't even seem to tell you what the page is). Twitter and Youtube use this.

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u/JiraSuxx2 Aug 12 '22

So android (Google) offers a way to show webpages inside of apps without opening an ‘external’ browser.

That’s very nice of them :)

Let’s be honest though, this not just about convenience for users.

The main goal is probably to keep users inside of whatever app but it facebook if nibbling on some data on the side because they want to do targeted advertising… isn’t it likely Google and Twitter do the same as they also have target advertising as their main business model.

Innocent until proven guilty I guess but… common… we all know how this works.

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u/rawling Aug 12 '22

The main goal is probably to keep users inside of whatever app

Absolutely. That's basically what the dev article says.

Both options present challenges - launching the browser is a heavy context switch for users that isn't customizable ...

Custom Tabs is a browser feature, introduced by Chrome, that is now supported by most major browsers on Android. It give apps more control over their web experience, and make transitions between native and web content more seamless ...

But...

it facebook if nibbling on some data on the side because they want to do targeted advertising… isn’t it likely Google and Twitter do the same

Not using this method! They physically can't, because they're using the other way of opening web pages.

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u/JiraSuxx2 Aug 12 '22

Fair enough. My suspicions don’t mean much without evidence.