Naughty Meta Was Tracking Users

grass found outside

Never forget that Zuck puts tape over his cameras and microphones. He would never let his family use Meta apps or wear his glasses the way he wants you to.

I'm glad for GDPR. To hell with all this progress at any cost. It does limit innovation in the sense it puts more strain on companies to _do right_ by the consumers, but that's kind of obvious. Arguments against GDPR often boil down to "if we push companies to respect consumers they cannot be as profitable!", which is true, but only means you're on the side of the soul wrenching companies and not the exploited consumers.

Meta is always harvesting your sensor data in the background. Pro tip, enable Dev mode on your android device by navigating to "about phone" & tapping on the build number 7 times. This enables a whole lot of features that can restrict data collection like this like being able to restrict running background processes, spoof your GPS, & other more technical settings that f*ck with data collection. Also, vpn.

13:12 Android dev here - INTERNET permission DOES NOT REQUIRE CONSENT, but it does have to be defined just like all the other permissions in the manifest file; other permissions (like access to media, camera, microphone, location) DO REQUIRE CONSENT (that is, if you're installing a RELEASE app (that's why you don't want to install random APKs, DEBUG apps don't require consent for permissions although they also generally perform worse)). edit: --haven't tested every single permission in a while so I may be forgetting something when it comes to debug as a reply suggests.

Once you are connected to the internet, you are being tracked.

On Android you have to declare the INTERNET permission in your app's manifest to make use of it, but it is automatically granted when declared without user intervention.

Meta got a 1.2B euro fine from EU already in 2023. They got another 800M euro fine in November 2024. So that's already 2B euro so far.

btw 1:10 - that was a reference to the Nirvana's song "It smells like teen spirit"

The maximum punishment still doesn't net them a negative margin for a single year btw. These fines are useless even at tens of billions.