Facebook is doubling down on tracking your behavior, despite the efforts of regulators worldwide.
Its new Link History app feature is yet another AdTech privacy dark pattern.
Meta's Mister Zuckerberg pretends it's all for the good of Facebook users.
Users can opt-out, but Link History is turned on by default.
It] might give users an illusion of privacy that Meta isn't offering.
This is a privacy improvement in some ways, but the setting raises more questions than it answers.
Meta has always kept track of the links you click on, and this is the first time users have had any visibility or control.
In other words, Meta is just asking users for permission for tracking that it's been using for over a decade.
Facebook says that with the new setting, you'll 'never lose a link again,' something we have never noticed as a problem.
There are several ways this setting might give users a false sense of privacy that Meta isn't offering.
The setting only affects Meta's record of the fact that you clicked a link in the first place.
Meta links everything you do on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and its other products.
Unlike some of Facebook's other privacy settings, Link History doesn't say it affects any of Meta's other apps, leaving you with the data harvesting status quo on other parts of Mark Zuckerberg's glorious empire.
Meta's data-gathering is also under scrutiny by other countries.
Facebook has such capture on its users that it bundles its own browser.
It doesn't matter if you run Firefox Mobile with noscript, adblock, and a million other tools to help stop tracking-when you click on a link in Facebook, it opens within Facebook.
Meta is a desperate surveillance capitalist with much of its 97% in revenues and profits jeopardized by privacy rights.
They just can't resist tracking our every move.
Between Facebook's aging out, Instagram quickly turning into yestermonth's TikTok, and Threads going nowhere, it has never been this easy to avoid Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg.
The cultural power of Twitter vastly outweighs its raw number of users.
This Cyber News was published on securityboulevard.com. Publication date: Wed, 03 Jan 2024 17:13:05 +0000