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Meta Found a New Way to Track Android Users Covertly via Facebook & Instagram (cybersecuritynews.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/privacy@programming.dev
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A sophisticated tracking method employed by Meta (Facebook) and Yandex that potentially affected billions of Android users through covert web-to-app communications via localhost sockets.

The technique allowed native Android apps, including Facebook and Instagram, to silently receive browser metadata, cookies, and commands from Meta Pixel scripts embedded on thousands of websites, effectively linking mobile browsing sessions to user identities and bypassing standard privacy protections.

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[–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I still can't comprehend why any script on any webpage is allowed to communicate with the localhost on a mobile device.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Could you explain what this means, I dont understand the localhost but I keep seeing it.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    localhost is "this device".

    connecting to localhost means connecting to something running on the same machine.

    Browsers generally block connections to other domains (ex if you're on google.com, the browser won't simply let the site contact amazon.com willy-nilly).

    But localhost is your own machine, so it is usually "trusted". Facebook exploited this fact to exfiltrate data from the browser to the other apps running on your own phone, which would, in turn be free to do with it as they please, because they're not the browser

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