Always thought Meta would absolutely do something creepy like this. Just ditched my app for the web app - bonus feature: No more ads (if you have a safari adblocker installed)
Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser
441–450 of 469 posts
Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser
#442Websites need cookie notices, but apps can track your full web usage (albeit within the in-app browser) without any such notice or opt in? Doesn't seem like this would be legal. Anyone know how this could be compliant in the EU? It's also frustrating that on an android device you can't simply disable in-app browsers globally.
GDPR enforcement is significantly lacking. There's basically zero ways this is compliant unless it's opt-in (but who in their right mind would opt-in?) but the regulators aren't interested in standing up to these nasty companies.
Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser
#443I 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 wouldn't say WKWebView is 'the old way', it isn't marked as deprecated and just because there's a new class that's easier to use doesn't mean they replace older classes that let you do more stuff. As you've found out, you've run into problems, but I have no idea why you would think not to use WKWebView if you can't do what you need. That said, in general, never, ever use in app browsers for surfing the web. We use…
This is what was confusing me, e-mails we got in years past about moving from UIWebView to WKWebView. In my head I misremembered that as needing to move from WKWebView to SFSafariViewController.
There are a couple apps where we are using SFSafariViewController but WKWebView would make our lives easier so I need to go back and look at switching those out.
> ITMS-90809: Deprecated API Usage - App updates that use UIWebView will no longer be accepted as of December 2020. Instead, use WKWebView for improved security and reliability. Learn more (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiwebview).
Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser
#444I 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…
How come that my apps get rejected if i don't use SafariViewController but they can publish them?
I think we both might be mistaking the required move from UIWebView to WKWebView (instead thinking we had to move from WKWebView to SFSafariViewController).
> ITMS-90809: Deprecated API Usage - New apps that use UIWebView are no longer accepted. Instead, use WKWebView for improved security and reliability. Learn more (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiwebview).
Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say WKWebView is 'the old way', it isn't marked as deprecated and just because there's a new class that's easier to use doesn't mean they replace older classes that let you do more stuff. As you've found out, you've run into problems, but I have no idea why you would think not to use WKWebView if you can't do what you need. That said, in general, never, ever use in app browsers for surfing the web. We use…
This is what was confusing me, e-mails we got in years past about moving from UIWebView to WKWebView. In my head I misremembered that as needing to move from WKWebView to SFSafariViewController. There are a couple apps where we are using SFSafariViewController but WKWebView would make our lives easier so I need to go back and look at switching those out. > ITMS-90809: Deprecated API Usage - App updates that use UIWeb…
I remember those, but we'd moved to WKWebView almost as s soon as Apple marked it deprecated.
We don't have many web views anymore, we still use a couple for signup and for the user to change their privacy settings because we need to change some behaviours based on the results, so we inject something to know if the user made changes and close the view. But there's no way for the user to navigate out to the greater web from the pages. Anything else and we instruct the os to open URLs
Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser
#446Only 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.
There is a UX benefit I've found, and maybe the app folks felt it as well.
Android has a nice universal "back" button which can close an opened tab and return you the app that spawned it. iOS tried a similar option with a "go back to App" link at the top left, but it doesn't fully close out browser tabs spawned by the app. Safari has gotten smarter about this, with browser "back" buttons closing spawned tabs in many cases, but not all.
So, in all those emails where I click to launch a browser to "read more" but see no reason to keep it around, the embedded browser actually plays a maintenance role: no need to get rid of those tabs that were just a funny comment I wanted to see but never need to keep.
Yes, the tracking is disappointing, but the UX of not having a zillion tabs open (and in old iOS version, hitting tab limits) makes my life easier.
Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
How come that my apps get rejected if i don't use SafariViewController but they can publish them?
I think we both might be mistaking the required move from UIWebView to WKWebView (instead thinking we had to move from WKWebView to SFSafariViewController). > ITMS-90809: Deprecated API Usage - New apps that use UIWebView are no longer accepted. Instead, use WKWebView for improved security and reliability. Learn more ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiwebview ).
I get this problem while using Cordova inappbrowser that uses WKWebView.
Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Thanks for the correction; I swapped the two in my head and you’re right.
Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
I naively assumed that they were using a WebView object and that Apple had tight controls over source code injection. Silly me!
Apple has deprecated but not yet removed the legacy web embeds that app developers use to spy on and track their users.
I’m wrong, and confused the older UIWebView with WKWebView.
Re: Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think they’ll ever remove that, because a decent portion of apps serve HTML from the app bundle (many hybrid apps do nothing else infact) and SFSafariController can’t hide its chrome. Many hybrid apps do need the delegation methods WKWebView offers, which are already way more limited than UIWebView was.
This is a policy problem, not a technical one. They'll keep WKWebView around but only for non-browsing purpose. Anything that resembles a web browser, SFSafariController or rejection.
That policy was recently hinted at here: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=trjs0tcd
But it hasn’t been enforced yet for big apps like Yelp and Instagram.