Home » Privacy and iPhone, Facebook bypasses Apple’s blocks and tracks us anyway

Privacy and iPhone, Facebook bypasses Apple’s blocks and tracks us anyway

by admin

Starting with iOS 14.5, iPhone and iPad apps need to ask users for permission with a dedicated pop-up before tracking them for advertising purposes. At the expense of this decision were the services that base their business model on profiling, such as for example Facebook and other companies in the Menlo Park group.

Social media controlled by Zuckerberg, one of the fiercest critics of privacy news wanted by AppleHowever, they already have other methods available to still collect as much data as possible from iPhone users, even when tracking has been blocked via the new pop-up.

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When you upload a photo taken with the Apple smartphone within Facebook or Instagram, for example, the two services are able to read all the metadata of the photos, including the GPS coordinates of the place where it was taken. In the version of the image that will appear on social networks, those data are adequately deleted, but in the meantime the app will have confiscated them to process them, cross them, recombine them in the user’s advertising profile.

The GPS location of a photo is a piece of data that can be used to enable very useful functions, such as geographic search within iPhone photos or Google Photos. However neither Facebook nor Instagram use the “EXIF” data for this purpose, but only and exclusively to track the user’s location through the GPS position of the images taken. Even if the user has chosen to disable the location history (the “location history”) from the privacy settings of the Zuckerberg social network.

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As reported on Forbes by the security and privacy expert Zak Doffman, this use of the location information in the photos is made explicit in Facebook’s privacy policy: “the data we collect”, it reads, “may include information in or about the content provided by the user (metadata), such as the location of a photo or the date a file was created ”.

The only way to prevent Facebook and Instagram from collecting location information from images is to automatically delete them before uploading the photos. On the App Store there are free applications that allow you to do it with simplicity (search for “exif stripper”). Alternatively, you can disable the recording of the location of the photo from the options of the Camera app, thus losing the ability to search for photos on the iPhone based on the location. Instead, it would be enough for iOS to integrate this standard possibility, in one future version of the operating system, for example with an option to delete GPS data from images uploaded to apps if the user has chosen not to share the location or to block tracking.

Meantime, despite the success of the new privacy features of iOS 14.5, there has been no push to the Facebook business model. Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues have repeatedly attacked Apple’s choices in recent months, accusing Tim Cook and his colleagues of anti-competitive behavior, and suggesting that small businesses advertising through the social platform would be the ones to pay for these changes. During the latest quarterly, in late April, the Menlo Park firm stated that the impact of the App Tracking Transparency (the name given by Apple to the set of new anti-tracking functions) would have been “manageable”, and that no particular economic repercussions are expected due to the changes introduced by iOS 14.5.

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