Apple has made a wide range of privacy changes to iOS over the last 12 months, and companies like Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram have fought against this.
We already know that this has cost Meta billions of dollars and now it has been revealed that Instagram and Facebook can track your web usage from their in-app browsers in iOS.
This was discovered by developer Felix Krause, who has discovered that Instagram and Facebook can track everything you do in their in-app browsers, including the password you enter.
The iOS Instagram and Facebook app render all third party links and ads within their app using a custom in-app browser. This causes various risks for the user, with the host app being able to track every single interaction with external websites, from all form inputs like passwords and addresses, to every single tap.
This discovery is something that we suspect Apple will be less than happy about, considering all of the privacy features that have been added to iOS since the release of iOS 14.5.
According to Felix Krause, Instagram and Facebook are actually injecting tracking code into websites that are opened in their in-app browsers.
With 1 Billion active Instagram users, the amount of data Instagram can collect by injecting the tracking code into every third party website opened from the Instagram & Facebook app is a staggering amount.
With web browsers and iOS adding more and more privacy controls into the user’s hands, it becomes clear why Instagram is interested in monitoring all web traffic of external websites.
It will be interesting to see what Apple does about this, we suspect that this could end up being an issues for Facebook and Instagram.
Source Felix Krause, Techmeme
Image Credit: Brett Jordan
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