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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Alex Hern

Meta injecting code into Facebook, Instagram to track users, research says

Meta logo
Krause discovered the code injection by building a tool that could list all the extra commands added to a website by the browser. Photograph: Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has been rewriting websites its users visit, letting the company follow them across the web after they click links in its apps, according to new research from an ex-Google engineer.

The two apps have been taking advantage of the fact that users who click on links are taken to webpages in an “in-app browser”, controlled by Facebook or Instagram, rather than sent to the user’s web browser of choice, such as Safari or Firefox.

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