Oh it’s just as bad, believe me. Have restricted its access to only pre-selected photos, disabled running in background but that’s about all I can do. It has to have access to my contacts to be usable, and who knows what they do with that data.

194 million US users? That’s got to be bullshit. That’s almost two thirds of the population. Even if they claimed half of the population, I would still call bullshit.

Maybe I would believe 1/2 of people over 60.
And that goes down as we lower the age. If we’re talking under 30 years old, I might believe 1/5, maybe.

These fake numbers are how they defraud advertisers and data broker scammers.

The LAST thing I'd do with my mobile phone is install Facebook or Instagram. What a nightmare.

Facebook is damn near a necessity in the area I live because no one wants to host their own websites. I've still not given in to making an account, but I'm starting to feel the struggle of not being able to contact small businesses.

So, I can imagine some of those users are multiples of the same person if they also have an account for their business

Unless you run a custom ROM, like LineageOS or GrapheneOS, you most probably have some Meta apps installed at system level.

This is Meta Services, as a system app which can only be disabled, on my work Samsung.

Because plenty of people care very little about data or security but see all those people on there... so explaining how it is bad matters little as they've used facebook for over a decade

This is just gross. Just another privacy invasion from the company that decided to track and de-anonymize people around the internet even while those people were doing all the right things to prevent it.

Meta Apps Have Been Covertly Tracking Android Users' Web Activity for Months

A new report says that Meta and Yandex have been stealing your browsing data through their Android apps. Once you installed one of their apps on your phone, they could siphon this data from websites running a corresponding Meta Pixel or Yandex Metrica script.

Lifehacker (lifehacker.com)

some additional relevant statistics

united states barely saw 1% growth year over year and are projecting that growth to continue to slow.

India has nearly 3x the users of the United States. the u.s. is still second because it's the country it started in, but it's not far ahead of the 3rd and 4th place countries. India is an extreme outlier.

unfortunately they don't break down the age demographic by region, but I'd bet that if we specifically look at daily active users in the United States the age demo would skew much older.

so, it seems like it's similar to what many fast food restaurants have been experiencing lately. the growth opportunities in the United States dried up so the decided to push like hell everywhere else. i bet the growth they saw in India over the last decade was explosive. probably bigger than anything they had ever seen before. bigger than when it was still growing in the u.s.. meanwhile they project that over the next decade in the u.s. they'll see maybe 8% user growth and that's pretty optimistic.

so we probably won't actually see much Facebook marketing in the u.s.. the only way they can capture more u.s users is by buying more apps, like when they bought Instagram.

this does seem to imply that the part of the world where Facebook has become a fact of life is very specifically India. I'm sorry to hear that for them.

Actually, contacts access isn't strictly necessary! I run it with the permission disabled, and although it complains regularly, it still works. I don't have any issues with having to remember people's numbers either since they're recognisable from the profile pictures and because I talk to the same few people usually

I don’t have that kind of memory unfortunately. It seems there is similar limitation mechanism to contacts as there is for pictures on iOS, but picking each individual person I like WA to know from a list of a few hundred people is quite painful.