After Apple updated its privacy rules in 2021 to easily allow iOS users to opt out of all tracking by third-party apps, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that Meta could lose $10 billion in revenue in a year.
Meta's business model is based on selling user data to advertisers, and it appears that the owner of Facebook and Instagram has sought new avenues to continue collecting data on a large scale and recover revenue that was suddenly lost.
Last month, privacy researcher and former Google engineer, Felix Krause, claimed that one of the ways Meta sought to recover its losses was by directing any link a user clicked in the app to open in the browser. from tracking anything you do on any website, including tracking passwords, without your consent.
This includes form entries and screenshots that give Meta a secret path through its in-app browser to access "personally identifiable information, private health details, text entries and other sensitive confidential facts", seemingly without users even knowing that data collection is taking place.
According to the complaint, which is based on the same facts revealed by Krause's research, "Meta has been injecting code into third-party websites, a practice that allows it to track users and intercept data that would not be available to them otherwise."
The latest complaint was filed yesterday by California-based Gabriel Willis and Louisiana-based Kerisha Davis. Adam Polk, an attorney from the legal team at Girard Sharp LLP, told ars tech that it's important to prevent META from getting away with masking ongoing privacy breaches.
In the complaint, the legal team cited Meta's previous misdeeds of collecting user information without consent, noting that Meta's investigation had awarded Meta a $5 billion fine.