This is a clickbait article - the issue is not with Facebook, but with Apple iPhones where this data is stored as part of the image EXIF information.
Facebook still ‘secretly’ tracks your iPhone
71–80 of 266 posts
Re: Facebook still ‘secretly’ tracks your iPhone
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes effort but I don't have to use WhatsApp anymore (last time was last year to speak to a Google employee I started talking with here on HN). I have contacts in UK, Scotland, Germany, Norway, Pakistan, India, South Africa and probably a few more. They all have installed Telegram by now. Of course I think we can do better than Telegram but at least I am not contributing to forcing everyone to give all their meta…
I wouldn’t be celebrating WA->Telegram as a great win, telegram is not encrypted end2end and stores the plaintext on their servers. So folks have switched from giving Zuck metadata, to giving Durov their messages.
it stands to hope that telegram does not employ a seemingly endless list of advertising partners with 'legitimate interest'
Re: Facebook still ‘secretly’ tracks your iPhone
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately it's not that simple for everyone. I personally would lose contact with a lot of people if I delete Messenger or Whatsapp. On all my contacts, I have two on Signal, zero on Matrix.
I really hate it when people say “just delete Facebook apps”. I would lose touch with almost everyone I know. They either use Facebook or WhatsApp, I can’t justify deleting either.
They make no where near as much money on you from WhatsApp as they do from Facebook.
Re: Facebook still ‘secretly’ tracks your iPhone
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
In some countries, you can't perform essential tasks such as booking a doctor's appointment without Whatsapp. It's not that simple.
Honest question, can't you call or sms them? It's like they don't respond to anything non whatsapp?
No, you can’t. If you call them they won’t answer and will just write you on WhatsApp to ask what you wanted. If you SMS, no reply or they will reply on WhatsApp.
One reason is because a lot of phone plans include few or no calls/SMS but include unlimited Whatsapp. When one app is completely ubiquitous in a society and free, people will simply not understand why you want to do something a different way and will often wonder if you’re trying to scam them.
Re: Facebook still ‘secretly’ tracks your iPhone
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't provide end-to-end-encryption for WhatsApp so I'd actually call this worse than just using WhatsApp in the first place. Facebook gets all the data and your messages are stored somewhere (either at Beeper or on your own server) as plaintext.
You think Facebook does not have access to Whatsapp messages ? Would be very surprised if thats not the case.
One's speculation, the other's a certainty?
Good thing that Beeper lets you self-host their (AGPLd) bridges.
Re: Facebook still ‘secretly’ tracks your iPhone
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really hate it when people say “just delete Facebook apps”. I would lose touch with almost everyone I know. They either use Facebook or WhatsApp, I can’t justify deleting either.
They make no where near as much money on you from WhatsApp as they do from Facebook.
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Re: Facebook still ‘secretly’ tracks your iPhone
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
In some countries, you can't perform essential tasks such as booking a doctor's appointment without Whatsapp. It's not that simple.
not a single day goes by without the company taking a crap in some corner. my proposal is more radical. rally to ban FB in that country. incentivize local companies to come up with alternative solutions. zuck and his comrades have no business poking their noses into foreigners medical data anyway. it would also avoid less taxes being lost on facebooks Double Irish tax evasion. treat them like the cancer they are. don…
Or ban it from iPhone for one or two versions so they stop this one tracking. Then repeat often enough that people start thinking it is uncertain that FB/WA be available, and don’t require WA to book a doctor’s appointment.
Re: Facebook still ‘secretly’ tracks your iPhone
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
You lose useful features like finding photos based on location if you don't remember the date it was taken. I think the better option is: (1) Make it obvious when location data is being included with a photograph, and exclude it by default - especially if the app doesn't already have Precise Location access. (2) Apps that manage your entire photo library and all its EXIF data (think Amazon Photos / Google Photos, or…
Yes, the iOS photo library API should really strip out the EXIF data before passing to apps unless the user has let them have access to it - I bet this will be added at some point. Facebook would like to access your photos: Select Photos All Photos Strip location and other metadata
This option does comes up when sharing from the Photos app - I think this in possibly new in 14.5?
The manage photos screen in apps does say metadata is included, but doesn’t yet give an option to strip it.
Re: Facebook still ‘secretly’ tracks your iPhone
#79Yeah. This is not particularly a Facebook problem. And it certainly is not an iPhone exclusive one. I would be willing to bet my 2¢ that Apple photo backups store your photos with exif data. Should be trivially easy to strip this info and "track" you as well. Am not seeing anyone crying over this.
It's a feature, not a bug. I *want* my photo saving software to display photos on a map.
Re: Facebook still ‘secretly’ tracks your iPhone
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes effort but I don't have to use WhatsApp anymore (last time was last year to speak to a Google employee I started talking with here on HN). I have contacts in UK, Scotland, Germany, Norway, Pakistan, India, South Africa and probably a few more. They all have installed Telegram by now. Of course I think we can do better than Telegram but at least I am not contributing to forcing everyone to give all their meta…
I wouldn’t be celebrating WA->Telegram as a great win, telegram is not encrypted end2end and stores the plaintext on their servers. So folks have switched from giving Zuck metadata, to giving Durov their messages.
A couple of things:
- back when I started moving groups WhatsApp wasn't E2E-encrypted
- one of those (Zuck and Durov) is a known bad guy and it isn't Durov. The other might or might not be a bad guy, but if he is he is truly hiding it well for now.
- also once I have managed to get people to understand that multiple messengers exist I hope much of the work is done already and the first groups have already been on Telegram so long that I might start to push them towards Matrix without triggering any bad feelings. (Yep, possible: the oldest one I've seen jumping from WhatsApp to Telegram with no issues at all must have been well over 80.)