Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of websites is de-anonymizing visitors by abusing legitimate Internet protocols, causing Chrome and other browsers to surreptitiously send unique identifiers to native apps installed on a device, researchers have discovered. Google says it's investigating the abuse, which allows Meta and Yandex to convert ephemeral web identifiers into persistent mobile app user identities.

The covert tracking—implemented in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica trackers—allows Meta and Yandex to bypass core security and privacy protections provided by both the Android operating system and browsers that run on it. Android sandboxing, for instance, isolates processes to prevent them from interacting with the OS and any other app installed on the device, cutting off access to sensitive data or privileged system resources. Defenses such as state partitioning and storage partitioning, which are built into all major browsers, store site cookies and other data associated with a website in containers that are unique to every top-level website domain to ensure they're off-limits for every other site.

Even then, most tracking is done through fingerprinting.

Meta should be broken up and its leadership barred from working in tech (or politics)

Yeah it makes me laugh when people talk about "don't use cookies" or "block ads" like companies didn't switch to more advanced techniques (like hell, I saw a paper where they could fingerprint you just simply by how you interact with the webpage) 15 years ago.

There is no way to use the modern web without getting fingerprinted.

Well “block ads” is also shorthand for “block as many 3rd-party requests as possible while maintaining the desired content” which absolutely improves your privacy and prevents a lot of fingerprinting scripts from ever loading.

I'd nail my foot to the floor before I installed WhatsApp.

Not sure about the "nightly" part (as opposed to beta or stable), but yes.

That's the thing though, websites have gone away from "fingerprinting scripts" and have started finger printing you by what you serve, how and when you access it, and other things that they can all collect purely on the server side. The rest is just for advertising and data collection for improvements.

So you got all your friends, family and coworkers and acquaintances using Signal?

We found that browsers such as Chrome, Firefox and Edge are susceptible to this form of browsing history leakage in both default and private browsing modes. Brave browser was unaffected by this issue due to their blocklist and the blocking of requests to the localhost; and DuckDuckGo was only minimally affected due to missing domains in their blocklist.

Aside from having uBlock Origin and not having any Meta/Yandex apps installed, anyone aware of additional Firefox settings that could help shut this nonsense down?

they still try that?

i can't remember the last time i have seen one of those warnings.

So you got all your friends, family and coworkers and acquaintances using Signal?

Fair warning: Last week one of my accounts was seemingly shadowbanned, and now gets "This content isn't available" on every video.

Logging out plays videos, making a new brand account worked, etc. and no notification from youtube.

.

I prefer nightly because about:config is accessible unlike on the mainline version. Does Beta also allow that?

I feel like that's all you need. You don't have their apps installed, so the problem is already solved. If you use uBlock Origin to block their trackers, the problem is solved. So you've solved it twice.

I know that people here generally like to shit on Brave, but it seems that the claim "Privacy by default" has held up in this context.

Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of websites is de-anonymizing visitors by abusing legitimate Internet protocols, causing Chrome and other browsers to surreptitiously send unique identifiers to native apps installed on a device, researchers have discovered. Google says it's investigating the abuse, which allows Meta and Yandex to convert ephemeral web identifiers into persistent mobile app user identities.

The covert tracking—implemented in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica trackers—allows Meta and Yandex to bypass core security and privacy protections provided by both the Android operating system and browsers that run on it. Android sandboxing, for instance, isolates processes to prevent them from interacting with the OS and any other app installed on the device, cutting off access to sensitive data or privileged system resources. Defenses such as state partitioning and storage partitioning, which are built into all major browsers, store site cookies and other data associated with a website in containers that are unique to every top-level website domain to ensure they're off-limits for every other site.

Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of websites is de-anonymizing visitors by abusing legitimate Internet protocols, causing Chrome and other browsers to surreptitiously send unique identifiers to native apps installed on a device, researchers have discovered. Google says it's investigating the abuse, which allows Meta and Yandex to convert ephemeral web identifiers into persistent mobile app user identities.

The covert tracking—implemented in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica trackers—allows Meta and Yandex to bypass core security and privacy protections provided by both the Android operating system and browsers that run on it. Android sandboxing, for instance, isolates processes to prevent them from interacting with the OS and any other app installed on the device, cutting off access to sensitive data or privileged system resources. Defenses such as state partitioning and storage partitioning, which are built into all major browsers, store site cookies and other data associated with a website in containers that are unique to every top-level website domain to ensure they're off-limits for every other site.

Useless article, but at least they link the source: https://localmess.github.io/

We disclose a novel tracking method by Meta and Yandex potentially affecting billions of Android users. We found that native Android apps—including Facebook, Instagram, and several Yandex apps including Maps and Browser—silently listen on fixed local ports for tracking purposes.

These native Android apps receive browsers' metadata, cookies and commands from the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica scripts embedded on thousands of web sites. These JavaScripts load on users' mobile browsers and silently connect with native apps running on the same device through localhost sockets. As native apps access programatically device identifiers like the Android Advertising ID (AAID) or handle user identities as in the case of Meta apps, this method effectively allows these organizations to link mobile browsing sessions and web cookies to user identities, hence de-anonymizing users' visiting sites embedding their scripts.

UPDATE: As of June 3rd 7:45 CEST, Meta/Facebook Pixel script is no longer sending any packets or requests to localhost. The code responsible for sending the _fbp cookie has been almost completely removed.