"It appears as though Meta (aka: Facebook's parent company) and Yandex have found a way to sidestep the Android Sandbox," writes Slashdot reader TheWho79. Researchers disclose the novel tracking method in a report: 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 programmatically 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.

This web-to-app ID sharing method bypasses typical privacy protections such as clearing cookies, Incognito Mode and Android's permission controls. Worse, it opens the door for potentially malicious apps eavesdropping on users' web activity.

While there are subtle differences in the way Meta and Yandex bridge web and mobile contexts and identifiers, both of them essentially misuse the unvetted access to localhost sockets. The Android OS allows any installed app with the INTERNET permission to open a listening socket on the loopback interface (127.0.0.1). Browsers running on the same device also access this interface without user consent or platform mediation. This allows JavaScript embedded on web pages to communicate with native Android apps and share identifiers and browsing habits, bridging ephemeral web identifiers to long-lived mobile app IDs using standard Web APIs. This technique circumvents privacy protections like Incognito Mode, cookie deletion, and Android's permission model, with Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica scripts silently communicating with apps across over 6 million websites combined.

Following public disclosure, Meta ceased using this method on June 3, 2025. Browser vendors like Chrome, Brave, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo have implemented or are developing mitigations, but a full resolution may require OS-level changes and stricter enforcement of platform policies to prevent further abuse.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Meta thinks there's no reason to carry on with its defense after the Federal Trade Commission closed its monopoly case, and the company has moved to end the trial early by claiming that the FTC utterly failed to prove its case. "The FTC has no proof that Meta has monopoly power," Meta's motion for judgment (PDF) filed Thursday said, "and therefore the court should rule in favor of Meta." According to Meta, the FTC failed to show evidence that "the overall quality of Meta's apps has declined" or that the company shows too many ads to users. Meta says that's "fatal" to the FTC's case that the company wielded monopoly power to pursue more ad revenue while degrading user experience over time (an Internet trend known as "enshittification"). And on top of allegedly showing no evidence of "ad load, privacy, integrity, and features" degradation on Meta apps, Meta argued there's no precedent for an antitrust claim rooted in this alleged harm.

"Meta knows of no case finding monopoly power based solely on a claimed degradation in product quality, and the FTC has cited none," Meta argued. Meta has maintained throughout the trial that its users actually like seeing ads. In the company's recent motion, Meta argued that the FTC provided no insights into what "the right number of ads" should be, "let alone" provide proof that "Meta showed more ads" than it would in a competitive market where users could easily switch services if ad load became overwhelming. Further, Meta argued that the FTC did not show evidence that users sharing friends-and-family content were shown more ads. Meta noted that it "does not profit by showing more ads to users who do not click on them," so it only shows more ads to users who click ads.

Meta also insisted that there's "nothing but speculation" showing that Instagram or WhatsApp would have been better off or grown into rivals had Meta not acquired them. The company claimed that without Meta's resources, Instagram may have died off. Meta noted that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom testified that his app was "pretty broken and duct-taped" together, making it "vulnerable to spam" before Meta bought it. Rather than enshittification, what Meta did to Instagram could be considered "a consumer-welfare bonanza," Meta argued, while dismissing "smoking gun" emails from Mark Zuckerberg discussing buying Instagram to bury it as "legally irrelevant." Dismissing these as "a few dated emails," Meta argued that "efforts to litigate Mr. Zuckerberg's state of mind before the acquisition in 2012 are pointless."

"What matters is what Meta did," Meta argued, which was pump Instagram with resources that allowed it "to 'thrive' -- adding many new features, attracting hundreds of millions and then billions of users, and monetizing with great success." In the case of WhatsApp, Meta argued that nobody thinks WhatsApp had any intention to pivot to social media when the founders testified that their goal was to never add social features, preferring to offer a simple, clean messaging app. And Meta disputed any claim that it feared Google might buy WhatsApp as the basis for creating a Facebook rival, arguing that "the sole Meta witness to (supposedly) learn of Google's acquisition efforts testified that he did not have that worry." In sum: A ruling in Meta's favor could prevent a breakup of its apps, while a denial would push the trial toward a possible order to divest Instagram and WhatsApp.

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from The Guardian, written by columnist Emma Brockes: Mark Zuckerberg has gone on a promotional tour to talk up the potential of AI in human relationships. I know; listening to Zuck on friendship is a bit like taking business advice from Bernie Madoff or lessons in sportsmanship from Tonya Harding. But at recent tech conferences and on podcasts, Zuck has been saying he has seen the future and it's one in which the world's "loneliness epidemic" is alleviated by people finding friendship with "a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do." In essence, we'll be friends with AI, instead of people. The missing air quotes around "knows" and "understands" is a distinction we can assume Zuck neither knows nor understands.

This push by the 41-year-old tech leader would be less startling if it weren't for the fact that semi-regularly online now you can find people writing about their relationships with their AI therapist or chatbot and insisting that if it's real to them, then it's real, period. The chatbot is, they will argue, "actively" listening to them. On a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel last month Zuck envisaged a near-future in which "you'll be scrolling through your feed, and there will be content that maybe looks like a Reel to start, but you can talk to it, or interact with it and it talks back." The average American, he said, has fewer than three friends but needs more. Hey presto, a ready solution.

The problem, obviously, isn't that chatting to a bot gives the illusion of intimacy, but that, in Zuckerberg's universe, it is indistinguishable from real intimacy, an equivalent and equally meaningful version of human-to-human contact. If that makes no sense, suggests Zuck, then either the meaning of words has to change or we have to come up with new words: "Over time," says Zuckerberg, as more and more people turn to AI friends, "we'll find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable." ... The sheer wrongness of this argument is so stark that it puts anyone who gives it more than a moment's thought in the weird position of having to define units of reality as basic as "person." To extend Zuckerberg's logic: a book can make you feel less alone and that feeling can be real. Which doesn't mean that your relationship with the author is genuine, intimate or reciprocated in anything like the way a relationship with your friends is.

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Meta is delaying the release of its largest Llama 4 AI model, known as "Behemoth," over concerns that it may not be enough of an advance on previous models. "It's another indicator that the AI industry's scaling strategy -- 'just make everything bigger' -- could be hitting a wall," notes Axios. From the report: The Journal says that Behemoth is now expected to be released in the fall or even later. It was originally scheduled to coincide with Meta's Llamacon event last month, then later postponed till June. It's also possible the company could speed up a more limited Behemoth release.

According to Rest of the World, a major confrontation between Meta and the local authorities in Nigeria is currently taking place: "Local authorities have fined Meta $290 million for regulatory breaches, prompting the social media giant to threaten pulling Facebook and Instagram from the country." Techdirt reports: As with earlier EU fines imposed on the company, the sticking point is Meta's refusal to comply with local privacy laws [...]. The fine itself is small change for Meta, which had a net income of $62 billion on a turnover of $165 billion in 2024, and a market capitalization of $1.5 trillion. Meta's current revenues in Nigeria are relatively small, but its market shares are high: "According to social media performance tracker Napoleoncat, Meta has a massive presence in the country, with Facebook alone reaching about 51.2 million users as of May 2024, more than a fifth of the population. Instagram had 12.6 million Nigerian users as of November 2023, while WhatsApp had about 51 million users, making Nigeria the 10th largest market globally for the messaging app."

Since many Nigerians depend on Meta's platforms, the company might be hoping that there will be public pressure on the government not to impose the fine in order to avoid a shutdown of its services there. But it is hard to see Meta carrying out its threat to walk away from a country expected to be the third most populous nation in the world by 2050. In 2100, the population of Nigeria could reach 541 million according to current projections.

According to The Information (paywalled), Meta is reportedly developing facial recognition capabilities for its Ray-Ban smart glasses -- technology it previously avoided due to privacy concerns. 404 Media's Joseph Cox writes: The move is an obvious about-face from Meta. It's also interesting to me because Meta's PR chewed my ass off when I dared to report in October that a pair of students took Meta's Ray-Ban glasses and combined them with off-the-shelf facial recognition technology. That tool, which the students called I-XRAY, captured a person's face, ran it through an easy to access facial recognition service called Pimeyes, then went a step further and pulled up information about the subject from across the web, including their home address and phone number.

When I contacted Meta for comment for that story, Dave Arnold, a spokesperson for the company, said in an email he had one question for me. "That Pimeyes facial recognition technology could be used with ANY camera, correct? In other words, this isn't something that only is possible because of Meta Ray-Bans? If so, I think that's an important point to note in the piece," he wrote. This is true. But entirely misses the point of why the students created the tool with Meta's Ray-Ban glasses. They said themselves in a demonstration video they identified dozens of people without their knowledge. You do that by wearing a pair of glasses that look like any other. Meta's Ray-Ban's do have a light that turns on when it's recording, but according to the new report, Meta is questioning whether new versions of its glasses need this.

Meta's Reality Labs posted a $4.2 billion operating loss in Q1 2025. According to CNBC, cumulative losses since 2020 now exceed $60 billion. From the report: Meta's Reality Labs unit is responsible for the company's Quest-branded virtual reality headsets and Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. It's the key business unit that anchors CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans to build a new computing platform involving digital worlds accessible via VR and augmented reality devices. [...]

Wall Street has questioned Meta's big spending on the metaverse, which Zuckerberg has said could take many years to turn into a real business. The company must now also contend with sweeping new tariffs from President Donald Trump and the likely increase in costs that will follow, potentially leading to higher-priced devices. Last week, Meta said that an unspecified number of Reality Labs employees were laid off. Those workers were part of the Oculus Studios unit, which creates VR and AR games and content for Quest VR headsets.

Meta has expanded both the feature set and availability of its Ray-Ban smart glasses. Notable updates include live translation with offline support through downloadable language packs, the ability to send messages and make calls via Instagram, and conversations with Meta AI based on real-time visual context. The Verge reports: Live translation was first teased at Meta Connect 2024 last October, and saw a limited rollout through Meta's Early Access Program in select countries last December. Starting today it's getting a wider rollout to all the markets where the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are available. You can hold a conversation with someone who speaks English, French, Italian, or Spanish, and hear a real-time translation through the smart glasses in your preferred language. If you download a language pack in advance, you can use the live translations feature without Wi-Fi or access to a cellular network, making it more convenient to use while traveling abroad.

Meta also highlighted a few other features that are still enroute or getting an expanded release. Live AI, which allows the Meta AI smart assistant to continuously see what you do for more natural conversations is now "coming soon to general availability in the US and Canada." The ability to "send and receive direct messages, photos, audio calls, and video calls from Instagram on your glasses," similar to functionality already available through WhatsApp, Messenger, and iOS and Android's native messaging apps, is coming soon as well. Access to music apps like Spotify, Amazon Music, Shazam, and Apple Music is starting to expand beyond the US and Canada, Meta says. However, asking Meta AI to play music, or for more information about what you're listening to, will still only be available to those with their "default language is set to English."

Meta said the company plans to start using data collected from its users in the European Union to train its AI systems. Engadget reports: Starting this week, the tech giant will begin notifying Europeans through email and its family of apps of the fact, with the message set to include an explanation of the kind of data it plans to use as part of the training. Additionally, the notification will link out to a form users can complete to opt out of the process. "We have made this objection form easy to find, read, and use, and we'll honor all objection forms we have already received, as well as newly submitted ones," says Meta.

The company notes it will only use data it collects from public posts and Meta AI interactions for training purposes. It won't use private messages in its training sets, nor any interactions, public or otherwise, made by users under the age of 18. As for why the company wants to start using EU data now, it claims the information will allow it to fine tune its future models to better serve Europeans. "We believe we have a responsibility to build AI that's not just available to Europeans, but is actually built for them. That's why it's so important for our generative AI models to be trained on a variety of data so they can understand the incredible and diverse nuances and complexities that make up European communities," Meta states.

"That means everything from dialects and colloquialisms, to hyper-local knowledge and the distinct ways different countries use humor and sarcasm on our products. This is particularly important as AI models become more advanced with multi-modal functionality, which spans text, voice, video, and imagery."

Meta is considering a paid subscription in the UK that would remove advertisements from its platform. The BBC reports: Under the plans, people using the social media sites could be asked to pay for an ad-free experience if they do not want their data to be tracked. Meta already provides ad-free subscriptions for Facebook and Instagram users in the EU, starting from euros (5 pounds) a month. A spokesperson for the firm said the company was "exploring the option" of offering a similar service in the UK.

They said the firm was "engaging constructively" with the UK data watchdog about the subscription service, following a consultation in 2024. The Information Commissioner's Office previously said it expected Meta to consider data protection concerns before it launched an ad-free subscription. Meta says personalized advertising allows its platforms to be free at the point of access.

Guidance issued by the regulator in January states that users must be presented with a genuine free choice. Social media platforms such as Meta heavily rely on ad revenues, and the company says personalised advertising allows its platforms to be free. Advertising accounted for more than 96% of its revenue in its latest quarterly financial results.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Meta plans to test out X's algorithm for Community Notes to crowdsource fact-checks that will appear across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. In a blog, Meta said the testing in the U.S. would begin March 18, with about 200,000 potential contributors already signed up. Anyone over 18 with a Meta account more than six months old can also join a waitlist of users who will "gradually" and "randomly" be admitted to write and rate cross-platform notes during initial beta testing.

Meta claimed that borrowing X's approach would result in "less biased" fact-checking than relying on experts alone. But the social media company will delay publicly posting any notes until it's confident that the system is working. For users of Meta platforms, notes could help flag misleading content overlooked by prior fact-checking efforts. However, Meta confirmed that users will not be allowed to add notes correcting misleading advertisements, which means notes won't help reduce scam ads that The Guardian reported last August have been spreading on Facebook for years. Meta confirmed that the company plans to tweak X's algorithm over time to develop its own version of community notes, which "may explore different or adjusted algorithms to support how Community Notes are ranked and rated."

Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams shares a report from the BBC: Meta has won an emergency ruling in the US to temporarily stop a former director of Facebook from promoting or further distributing copies of her memoir. The book, Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who used to be the company's global public policy director, includes a series of critical claims about what she witnessed during her seven years working at Facebook.

Facebook's parent company, Meta, says the ruling -- which orders her to stop promotions "to the extent within her control" -- affirms that "the false and defamatory book should never have been published." The UK publisher Macmillan says it is "committed to upholding freedom of speech" and Ms Wynn-Williams' "right to tell her story." [You can also hear Ms Wynn-Williams interviewed in the BBC Radio 4 Media Show on March 12.]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A former senior Facebook executive has told the BBC how the social media giant worked "hand in glove" with the Chinese government on potential ways of allowing Beijing to censor and control content in China. Sarah Wynn-Williams -- a former global public policy director -- says in return for gaining access to the Chinese market of hundreds of millions of users, Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, considered agreeing to hiding posts that were going viral, until they could be checked by the Chinese authorities.

Ms Williams -- who makes the claims in a new book -- has also filed a whistleblower complaint with the US markets regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), alleging Meta misled investors. The BBC has reviewed the complaint. Facebook's parent company Meta, says Ms Wynn-Williams had her employment terminated in 2017 "for poor performance." It is "no secret we were once interested" in operating services in China, it adds. "We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we'd explored." Meta referred us to Mark Zuckerberg's comments from 2019, when he said: "We could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there, and they [China] never let us in."

Facebook also used algorithms to spot when young teenagers were feeling vulnerable as part of research aimed at advertisers, Ms Wynn-Williams alleges. A former New Zealand diplomat, she joined Facebook in 2011, and says she watched the company grow from "a front row seat." Now she wants to show some of the "decision-making and moral compromises" that she says went on when she was there. It is a critical moment, she adds, as "many of the people I worked with... are going to be central" to the introduction of AI. In her memoir, Careless People, Ms Wynn-Williams paints a picture of what she alleges working on Facebook's senior team was like.

Earlier this week, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox said the company's upcoming open-source Llama 4 AI will help power AI agents for hundreds of millions of businesses. CNBC reports: The AI agents won't just be responding to prompts. They will be capable of new levels of reasoning and action -- surfing the web and handling many tasks that might be of use to consumers and businesses. And that's where Shih comes in. Meta's AI is already being used by over 700 million consumers, according to Shih, and her job is to bring the same technologies to businesses. "Not every business, especially small businesses, has the ability to hire these large AI teams, and so now we're building business AIs for these small businesses so that even they can benefit from all of this innovation that's happening," she told CNBC's Julia Boorstin in an interview for the CNBC Changemakers Spotlight series.

She expects the uptake among businesses to happen soon, and spread far and wide. "We're quickly coming to a place where every business, from the very large to the very small, they're going to have a business agent representing it and acting on its behalf, in its voice -- the way that businesses today have websites and email addresses," Shih said. While major companies across sectors of the economy are investing millions of dollars to develop customer LLMs, "doing fancy things like fine tuning models," as Shih put it, "If you're a small business -- you own a coffee shop, you own a jewelry shop online, you're distributing through Instagram -- you don't have the resources to hire a big AI team, and so now our dream is that they won't have to."

For both consumers and businesses, the implications of the advances discussed by Cox and Shih will be significant in daily life. For consumers, Shih says, "Their AI assistant [will] do all kinds of things, from researching products to planning trips, planning social outings with their friends." On the business side, Shih pointed to the 200 million small businesses around the world that are already using Meta services and platforms. "They're using WhatsApp, they're using Facebook, they're using Instagram, both to acquire customers, but also engage and deepen each of those relationships. Very soon, each of those businesses are going to have these AIs that can represent them and help automate redundant tasks, help speak in their voice, help them find more customers and provide almost like a concierge service to every single one of their customers, 24/7."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A study by the Pew Research Center found that Americans' views of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg skew more negative than positive. While Zuckerberg has sparked chatter in Silicon Valley with his sudden interest in high fashion, the Meta CEO is less popular than President Trump's right-hand man, Elon Musk, the report found. While about 54% of U.S. adults say they have an unfavorable view of Musk, 67% feel negatively toward Zuckerberg. [...] But Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, is more universally disliked, though he draws more ire from the left-leaning demographic. While 60% of Republican and Republican-leaning respondents hold an unfavorable view of Zuckerberg, 76% of their Democratic counterparts share that sentiment.

So, while Zuck may be playing the part of the cool guy, Americans haven't been fooled by his gold chains or musical ambitions, it seems. Pew's study involved a panel of 5,086 randomly selected U.S. adults. The survey was conducted from January 27, 2025, through February 2, 2025, so these responses reflect people's recent opinions.