Same for Uber, which sends both important order updates and marketing as push notifications.

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".

>Surely Apple also knows this

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.

Apple knows that they are being accused. Apple doesn't know whether the accusations are true. When they boot someone, they know it's true.

They probably have an agreement that involves money and anticompetitive behaviour.

So is Google and Apple themselves. There is no entity here which is a paragon of virtue in the valley. I do believe that cynicism is detrimental to mental health, and hope stems from assuming things can and do get better sometimes.

> Meta is run by people with no regard for ethics, and if that surprises you, that’s on you.

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.

Most people are not the Hacker News types who know this. The Facebook movie is the closest the average person has come to knowing how evil this company is.

Sorry, a disgruntled former employee saying something with no evidence or details isn't exactly "confirmation".

15 years ago it was celebrated in the media as a “cool inventive cutting edge idea” that Facebook was running psychological experiments on it’s users without consent.

What were the signs ?

>Meta also secretly linked user data with other information to track users’ activity on other websites without their permission — despite Apple in 2021 introducing measures explicitly requiring consent, according to Purkayastha’s filings.

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.

IIRC, Apple pulled Facebook's enterprise developer cert over Onavo stuff; again IIRC, Apple had pulled Onavo from the app store, and Facebook continued to offer it to users by enrolling them in the enterprise developer system; on January 30, 2019 Apple revoked that cert: Onavo distribution was stopped in addition to Facebook's internal apps.

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.

I like my native apps and I'm not a fan of PWAs because they cannot be made to easily run offline.

>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.

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.

I assume this is a secondary phone? Curious as I’ve been contemplating the same thing

> it’s just human nature

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.

Enshittification really hits hard when the luster has fallen but the money printing must continue. The general perception that Facebook is somewhat of a utility app now, the young people have departed for more hip and current platforms, and it's just most used by grandparents and content-generating bots. (Though it's still useful for Marketplace and Events and so forth.) Also long before this, FB weakened a lot of its other features such as Groups, or Facebook Apps.

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.

In all fairness to Meta, “don’t be evil” was a different company. Meta is the “they trust me, [the] dumb fucks” company. So they’re being somewhat true to their words. /s