> Meta must face a lawsuit alleging that it secretly tracked Android users' browsing activity on mobile websites that embedded Meta's analytics pixel, and linked that activity to users' identities, a federal judge ruled Monday.
> The decision, issued by U.S. District Court Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco, grew out of a class-action complaint initially brought last June by California resident Devin Rose (and later joined by other Android users).
> Rose alleged that between September 2024 and June 2025, Meta exploited Android's localhost -- a feature that allows software developers to test applications -- to connect users’ mobile web browsing to their Facebook and Instagram profiles.
May 12, 2026
i would love to have a software engineer's union, not so much to get better working conditions but to be able to say stuff like "i can't implement that unethical feature, it's against union rules and i'd lose my membership".
Start one. Unions are worker owned. You could also join the IWW.
Unions in the US are nerfed, by law.
Take a lead, let me sign up :)
And this is why we don't have one. Someone else is expected to do the hard part.
You don't need to join a union to push back against unethical feature requests.
The collective leverage of a union gives you significantly more power to do something like this.
Only if the union is against the unethical request. In some cases the union may be for it, which makes it even harder to push back.
> You don't need to join a union to push back against unethical feature requests.
If you push back against unethical feature requests:
No union: you get fired
Union: you still get fired
maybe, but the union could provide a lot of services to someone who loses their job this way (like income insurance and legal services) and could leverage collective power over companies that demonstrate a pattern of behavior.
Still a better outcome than tossing your ethics overboard.
Looks like they stopped doing it
https://localmess.github.io
> UPDATE: As of June 3rd 7:45 CEST, Meta/Facebook Pixel script is no longer sending any packets or requests to localhost. The code responsible for sending the _fbp cookie has been almost completely removed. Yandex has also stopped the practice we describe below.
Chrome and Firefox have deployed / are deploying local-network-access which prompts the user when apps try this.
I guess that's why I am getting so many "Allow to find devices on your network" alerts. Good feature overall.
Only a good feature if users have a clue what that question means. Most will click "Yes" because they want to get on with whatever they want to do.
Change it to something like "This website is trying to spy on your local devices, do you want to allow this?"
I was just about to say that my question in regards to this was "what are web browsers doing about it?"
I've seen it and at least in Chrome it seems to be treating all URLs which are based on an IP address as "local", regardless of the class of the address.
I'd be inherently suspicious of any website in the wild attempting to contact a bare IP address. Aside from localhost, my default assumption would be that such a website is either trying to circumvent my hosts file (or circumvent my other DNS configuration, e.g. pi-hole or DNS-over-HTTPS), malware trying to reach a command-and-control server, or malware trying to circumvent my adblocker.
Off topic: I wonder how hard it is to poison this type of data gathering?