US company Meta has been hit with several lawsuits. Privacy advocates accuse the company of circumventing Apple’s privacy policy to spy on users. According to reports, the apps from Instagram and Facebook would inject JavaScript code on visited websites for this purpose.
Facebook parent company Meta has been hit with a class action lawsuit. The accusation: the U.S. company secretly circumvented the security measures that Apple introduced last year to better protect iPhone users from espionage and data abuse.
Two Facebook users have therefore filed a lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco. They accuse the company of circumventing Apple’s privacy policies and violating state and federal laws that restrict the unauthorized collection of personal data.
Does Meta feed JavaScript code into websites?
As the Bloomberg news agency reports, a similar complaint reached the court just a week earlier. It was based on a report by privacy researcher Felix Krause, who claimed that Instagram and Facebook’s apps on iOS were feeding JavaScript code to websites.
The code, according to Krause, subsequently allows the apps to “track everything you do on a website.” That includes sharing passwords, he said. Meta, meanwhile, acknowledged that the Facebook app monitors browser activity. However, the company denied that the app illegally collects user data.
Apple privacy changes cost Meta ten billion US dollars
According to the lawsuits, collecting data from the Facebook app helps Meta circumvent Apple’s privacy policy, which states that third-party apps must obtain consent from their users before tracking their activities online or offline.
Apple’s 2021 privacy changes restrict Meta’s ability to collect user data from iOS users. The US company reportedly lost around ten billion US dollars as a result.
Does the Facebook app circumvent Apple’s privacy rules?
Meanwhile, the class action lawsuit says that the Facebook app circumvents Apple’s privacy rules by loading links in the in-app browser and not in the default browser. And further:
This allows Meta to intercept, monitor and record its users’ interactions and communications with third parties and provide Meta with data that it aggregates, analyzes and uses to increase its advertising revenue.
