Meta’s Latest Attack on Privacy

I've long had an interest in online privacy. I use Brave browser on my Android which blocks a lot by default, disable location except when I need it, and log out of Facebook everywhere. I've used Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)'s Privacy Badger and a number of other Chrome extensions on my desktop Chrome for years. I still use Firefox/Developer for development work. This setup works OK, but its always irritated me that Android Chrome doesn't allow extensions, which is why I have it installed but rarely use it.

Last week I took my daughter to the Gold Coast for a few days, to celebrate completing her undergrad studies. We spent a day hitting the shops at Pacific Fair. An hour after we got back to our hotel, I started getting ads on Instagram & Facebook for a shop I'd WALKED INTO earlier that day. I was in there less than 3 minutes, didn't try anything on, neither of us have ever bought anything from this store, we don't follow it on social media, and neither of us have ever had ads for this store before. My daughter didn't even go in, and I didn't use my phone while I was in there.

This type of surveillance literally makes me see red. It is intrusive and inappropriate and unwelcome, and it shouldn't be allowed. I understand that cameras are there to prevent shoplifting, and I get that marketing is a thriving industry, and I even help small business with their digital marketing efforts. But this has become waaay too much. 😡 Whenever it happens it always reminds me of that scene in "Minority Report" when Tom is on the run and gets bombarded with customised holographic ads - which is funny until you remember that movie is from 2002 and it seemed ridiculous at the time. 

This morning I read that Meta has been doing some incredibly dodgy stuff with Meta Pixel, which is now embedded in about 20% of the world's busiest websites. According to EFF:

"Meta’s tracking pixel was secretly communicating with Meta’s apps on Android devices. This violates a fundamental security feature (“sandboxing”) of mobile operating systems that prevents apps from communicating with each other."

There's more technical detail in the article. I'd like to say I don't understand it but after 30+ years on the internet I understand it perfectly. As long as we have these old non-technical political types running the show who don't have any idea what they're doing technology-wise, and techlords who only care about $$$ so they keep building stuff to make more $$$, and they are allowed to give the $$$ to the old non-technical political types to keep them compliant and not creating laws to contain them, it will continue. This is not the internet I envisaged and was so excited about back in the 1990's. 😢 

Read the article, all we can do is keep trying.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/protect-yourself-metas-latest-attack-privacy

This article was first published on LinkedIn