A bit weird that my Monzo seems to be sending data to Facebook?
My bank should send precisely zero things to advertising / marketing companies.
Have you raised it with their Help team? You should.
Unfortunately I cannot as I do not have a facebook account so cannot determine whether or not facebook hold data on me without creating an account.
I do not have access to see what the data is, but would certainly in their shoes investigate with high priority, and Would raise a security incident to do so. If it turns out to be empty and of no concern, then great. But ignoring such things is seldom wise.
They have the Facebook Pixel installed likely to do retargeting advertising when a person visits their website.
It's one of the most effective methods so it's very common to see it everywhere.
Doing retargeting for when (a) someone downloads their app but doesn't signup and (b) someone is a customer but has low engagement i.e. is likely to churn.
ID 894103617218109 Event CUSTOM Received on 13 November 2019 at 09:51
The only event is "CUSTOM".
I also suspect that soon Whatsapp will be doing the same sinister activity tracking once they go ahead with their plan to introduce ads later this year.
Still not ideal, but not completely terrible.
Yeah, Android devs, why is that an accessible API call?
For one thing this is how FB could figure out how popular their competitors like WhatsApp, Instagram or Snapchat were, and why they bought them, or tried to.
It all works really well and lets app be loosely coupled to each other. It's also super flexible so you can use it for lots of different use cases. The API itself hasn't changed much since the first release of Android.
The issue is that you can query the Intent system to see if there is an app installed that can open your Intent. On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense. You could then display an error message to the user asking them to install and app that can handle it. The problem is that you can create an Intent that you know can only be handled by a single app (using the package name) and then you'll know if it's installed or not.
For what it's worth, iOS used to have exactly the same issue. You could query the phone could handle a specific "custom protocol scheme" (used for deep linking). You could then just query a scheme which you know is for a specific app and tell if the user had it installed. Apple fixed this by requireing you to include a predefined list of schemes which you can query for in your Info.plist (manifest file) and limiting the number you can have (30 I believe).
All APIs with good intentions, but very easy to abuse. Apple is just more comfortable breaking backward compatibility to fix these sorts of issues.