Professor Gunes Acar from Radboud University discovered unusual tracking behavior on his university's website linked to Facebook. He noticed a connection to his own computer, prompting him to investigate further alongside researcher Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez. They found that Meta was linking web browsing data to its apps like Facebook and Instagram, even when users employed incognito mode or VPNs. This raised serious questions about Meta’s practices and ignored browser privacy measures, ultimately leading to the disabling of this controversial tracking method after media scrutiny.
Acar began searching online to see if anyone else had noticed the same thing. He found some Facebook developer forums where others were complaining about it.
What we saw is that the website communicates with the cell phone app to exchange information and identifiers, says Vallina-Rodriguez.
They had to test connections between websites and Facebook and Instagram, Meta's apps, to see what was actually happening.
Meta was linking information from its apps with each user's web browsing even in incognito mode or when using a VPN.
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