Meta bypassed Apple privacy protections, claims former employee
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
They won't because rules for thee, not for me. It's OK if someone big enough violates Apple's rules, but if a smaller dev does it? You get booted off the store.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... says "before you send [marketing push] notifications to people, you must receive their explicit permission to do so".
Apple themselves have started doing that, so zero chance of the rule being enforced.
> https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... says
Those are the Human Interface Guidelines, which are basically suggestions on how to make a proper app. They don’t impact policy and Apple has been shitting on them for years now. Liquid Glass breaks so many rules it’s not even funny. What you want to link to is the App Review Guidelines, specifically 4.5.4.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#4.5...
"Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges."
> Apple themselves have started doing that
Well, it's their platform. They've their own internal rules and app review processes, one would presume. Like how the cops can shoot people, but I can't.
That’s the one I wanted to link to. Fixed. Thank you.
> and agrees with the "you must" bit in the HIG.
I know. The point is that the HIG is not used to enforce app policy, the App Review Guidelines are.
> They've their own internal rules and app review processes, one would presume.
Which is exactly why they are in trouble with governments around the world.
> Like how the cops can shoot people, but I can't.
Cops can’t just shoot people (well, maybe in the US?), they have to have a reason. In any civilised nation, a cop who shoots a random person doesn’t just get a pat on the back and a thumbs up. They are meant to be public servants who help enforce the law, not vigilantes who stand above it.
This would be the same as the cops owning a monopoly business for profit and shooting anyone who competes with them. If Apple stops making their own apps for their platform, then yes, your analogy would make sense.
can be disabled via:
settings > communication > push notifications
but the worst part is when they add a new category (eg uber teen accounts) and surprise it’s enabled by default.
Ditto New York Times "Breaking News" alerts pushing features that were published a week ago, but didn't get enough traction for some editor.
No, this is not as simple as Meta calling internal APIs that can be detected. This is Meta developing tricky ways of identifying users from patterns of usage without regard to opt-in. If users consent, the app can use the Apple API to track. Easy. If users don’t consent, Meta tracks through tricks matching behavior stored on their servers.
This is Meta abiding by the letter of the Apple developer agreement but not the spirit of the agreement.
Yes, it is. It's just more manual.
Meta has repeatedly done this sort of thing. It's clear that Apple knows they're up to this stuff, and it's clear that Meta will continue to do it, and it's clear that Apple doesn't have the will to kill their apps over it.
Which they would absolutely do for an app you or I made.
Well, Apple did threatened to remove Facebook in the past, and they did get Meta to follow the rules back then
But, today, unfortunately I think you are right. If Apple bans Facebook, Meta will take the opportunity the EU has given them to start their own app store, which can have whatever privacy rules (read: none) they want.
I guess it's just another Brussels Effect.
They use supermarket loyalty cards to save $0.25 on a gallon of milk. They install tracker apps to save money on gas. People don't care.
I often find that people just reflexively assume that data collection about their habits is inherently a net negative, rather than laying out the cost benefit analysis.
Alone? Not much. It's about aggregating as many data points as possible. Your grocery is just one of those.
https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/personal-informa...
Ironic that you mention algorithmic renting fixing: a single digit percentage of the rental market actually used RealPage. And when cities banned it, rents were unchanged. The evidence of rent fixing is largely absent.
I would argue that the vast majority of people are unable to fairly evaluate this tradeoff due to the intentional lack of transparency in what is collected, how it is used, and who it gets shared with (and how they use it).
https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/facebook-movie-soc...
many "Hacker News types" happily work for FAANGs, see little to nothing wrong with the social ills their labor causes, and benefit handsomely from it... and would benefit little from acknowledging that or working to change those conditions (or their employment situation).
I genuinely do not understand why someone comments this, so I am earnestly asking you what do you wish to convey or accomplish with such a remark.
Yes, many of us on HN know Meta is deeply unethical. But not everyone does, or to which extent, and everyone has a different “final straw”. Someone may still think they operate within laws, for example. Furthermore, being known for being unethical should not leave them above reproach or criticism, nor should victims be blamed. It’s like seeing a report on increased killings by the KKK and answering “well, the KKK are a bunch of racists, and if that surprises you, that’s on you”. Information doesn’t have to be surprising to be useful.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/meta-and-yandex-are...
Do you have some examples of the media celebrating Facebook's psychological experiments? Perhaps you live in a different influence sphere or filter bubble than I do.
To check my centiment, I asked ChatGPT "What was the media sentiment ten years ago about Facebook running psychological experiments on people?" and here was its top-line response:
> Short answer: largely negative — shocked and critical. Journalists, ethicists and privacy advocates framed Facebook’s secret “emotional contagion” experiments as an ethical breach (lack of informed consent, manipulation of users’ moods, corporate research without proper oversight), while a smaller group of commentators pushed back saying large-scale A/B testing is routine for tech firms.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/2014/06/everything-you-need-to-know-ab... [2]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/the-ethical-... [3] https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-changed-way-experiments-...
Is that based on ... what? Or has Apple been surreptitiously mining this data on existing users without their consent?
"What size segment of Apple Watch users have undiagnosed hypertension" seems a challenging product discovery exploration, otherwise.
Does it fall in with our existing perception of Facebook created by them railing against Apple’s privacy controls, even to the point where Apple shut down their account and they were locked out of their own offices, or how they approach privacy on other platforms or their overall activities regarding privacy for over a decade Fits their m.o. pretty well.
That's frustratingly vague, not to mention it hinges on the complaint of a disgruntled employee. Facebook finding some way to bypass cross app tracking restrictions would be much more controversial than if they bought purchasing data (grouped by email) from data brokers, and then joined that with their own datasets, for instance.
This article says it's about Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT), introduced in 2021. Facebook changed their name to Meta in 2021 as well.
Yet another reason to dump native apps (many of which are built using the Facebook SDK despite having nothing to do with FB) in favour of web apps.
I also think this is a sign of late stage capitalism where the opportunities to profit “ethically” are becoming much harder to find and exploit. That leads to more pressure to find gray areas that others’ ethical or moral convictions prevented them from exploiting.
I just installed graphene os on a brand new cash-bought pixel for the express purpose of not being left out of some important WhatsApp groups or missing out on some other experiences that require installing apps that I know won’t respect my privacy. I assume anything from Meta is hazardous at this point.
It's not, though. The universal avarice of the current era may not be unprecedented in history, but it wasn't the norm through most of the 20th century. There was a time when layoffs were considered painful failures at some corporations, instead of routine business strategy -- probably because the Great Depression was still in living memory.
There isn't much point in the "cash-bought" part when android has blocked non-system apps from reading hardware identifiers years ago. Not to mention that facebook can easily deanonmyize you through your social graph.
So it makes sense that they're looking for more nefarious, scraping the bottom of the barrel, desparate behavior to keep the money printer churning despite increasing consumer apathy.