Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser

krausefx.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 469 posts

Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser

#402

Post by notpushkin »

Flimm wrote: post #96
nemothekid wrote: post #35

I also noticed TikTok does this as well; at the very least they are snooping inside their in-app browser to prevent you from visiting adult sites.

The article isn't complaining about in-app browsers per se, but that Instagram implements a special version of an in-app browser that injects Javascript code to track user behaviour. If you have noticed TikTok doing the same thing, please publish a blog post about it, and I expect it would get attention here on Hacker News, at least.

I would be really surprised if TikTok doesn't do this.

Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser

#403

Post by faizmokhtar »

altairprime wrote: post #301
riazrizvi wrote: post #235

Only Instagram? Every app maker who makes an in app browser can see what you do, that’s the point of embedding it. And why not? You arrive there because of a link in the container app you clicked on. They want to see what you do with the link they gave you. Otherwise only Google/Apple can see what you do with it. Someone can see what you do with the link no matter what.

Not necessarily. If they’re using a WKWebView, they can’t see what you’re doing, which is why Safari Autofill remains enabled in some but not all app-embedded web views.

Only SFSafariViewController prevents that. Devs still can inject javascript through WKWebView.

Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser

#406

Post by eCa »

miramba wrote: post #100
eCa wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same experience. When I want to access twitter I use " rel="nofollow">https://nitter.net/

Thank you!! I was unsuccessfully searching for something like this. Btw I also see a full screen, not closable login nag when scrolling down a few tweets. The solutions is to tap on login and close the dialog on the following screen. I won‘t make an account, twitter. Shut me out completely and I‘ll be gone, just like with reddit.

Happy to pay it forward. It was in a similar thread a few months ago that I found it.

Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser

#407

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

andix wrote: post #62

It would be interesting if this violates rights of the website owner the user is visiting. I known that embedding content of other websites into your own via an iframe can be a copyright violation. And what Meta does here is more or less like an iframe.

Copyright violations stem from distributing an unauthorized copy of a protected work. Modifying an authorized copy shown to one recipient can't be a violation.

User agents are expected to be empowered to transform the data they receive to suit the rendering requirements of the end user. Having a third party perform part of the transformation by supplying supplementary code executed by the user agent doesn't change anything.

Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser

#408

Post by yesbabyyes »

mandevil wrote: post #323
yesbabyyes wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what they mean is the Netware login dialogue, on Windows. My classmate hacked our high school's network, getting him thrown out of class. I'm pretty sure he used a different method, though. He got a job working for the school. This was in the mid 90s.

Colonial? (This definitely happened at my school, wondering how common this was.)

This was in Stockholm, Sweden. I'm not sure how it was done, but I imagine it involved the SAM file and Jack the Ripper or something along those lines.

Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser

#410

Post by interpol_p »

joshstrange wrote: post #184

I was super confused by this since to the best of my knowledge SFSafariViewController blocks anything like this, you, as a developer, cannot inject anything or peak into the view it creates. Then I got to the bottom and realized I was correct, but FB/Meta/IG/etc aren't using SFSafariViewController and instead using the older ways to embed a web view. Honestly I thought all other methods had been deprecated and had no…

I have started moving from an SFSafariViewController to a WKWebView in my app. In my case, we have a discussion forum that I wanted to display in a sidebar alongside the app, so people could get help while they work. I also wanted to intercept clicks on certain files to open them directly in the app — making it easier for users to check out other work on the forums.

However after reading this article what I will be doing is intercepting any links from my WKWebView to domains outside of my forums and opening them in an SFSafariViewController. I have no intention of tracking anyone, but neither do I want the responsibility or reputation for domains outside of my control

Post reply on HN