Washington Post’s Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)
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from the getting-off-trackers dept.
Meta’s Facebook and Instagram apps “were siphoning people’s data through a digital back door for months,” writes a Washington Post tech columnist, citing researchers who found no privacy setting could’ve stopped what Meta and Yandex were doing, since those two companies “circumvented privacy and security protections that Google set up for Android devices.
“But their tactics underscored some privacy vulnerabilities in web browsers or apps. These steps can reduce your risks.”
Stop using the Chrome browser. Mozilla’s Firefox, the Brave browser and DuckDuckGo‘s browser block many common methods of tracking you from site to site. Chrome, the most popular web browser, does not… For iPhone and Mac folks, Safari also has strong privacy protections. It’s not perfect, though. No browser protections are foolproof. The researchers said Firefox on Android devices was partly susceptible to the data harvesting tactics they identified, in addition to Chrome. (DuckDuckGo and Brave largely did block the tactics, the researchers said….)
Delete Meta and Yandex apps on your phone, if you have them. The tactics described by the European researchers showed that Meta and Yandex are unworthy of your trust. (Yandex is not popular in the United States.) It might be wise to delete their apps, which give the companies more latitude to collect information that websites generally cannot easily obtain, including your approximate location, your phone’s battery level and what other devices, like an Xbox, are connected to your home WiFi.
Know, too, that even if you don’t have Meta apps on your phone, and even if you don’t use Facebook or Instagram at all, Meta might still harvest information on your activity across the web.
“From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.”
— Dr. Seuss
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