[Lifestyle] SECURITY RESEARCHERS ADVISE UNINSTALLING FACEBOOK IF YOU HAVE AN IPHONE, WHY?

[Akrapovic]

The social network is still in the spotlight.

 

 

With the arrival of the new anti-tracking measures from Apple to all its iPhones, Facebook has seen how a good amount of the data that reached it has stopped, so it is more complicated for Mark Zuckerberg to know who each of us are. us and, above all, what we like and how our preferences are changing. So it was to be expected that he would look for alternative ways to keep his business afloat or that he already had them active before.

And that suspicion that many of us had that Facebook would not stand still and would try to maintain the flow of information at whatever price was confirmed by the report just published by some security specialists who, as the main summary of their work, come to indicate that if you have an iPhone, run to delete Facebook (and Instagram) from the apps you have installed on it.

What is the app doing?
What security researchers have just discovered is that Facebook is accessing the iPhone's accelerometer to analyze by vibrations what activities we are carrying out on a daily basis and, in this way, discover what our behaviors are but above all where we are, comparing everything the information they obtain with that of other devices that show similar patterns.

According to two of those responsible for this work, Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk, "Facebook reads accelerometer data all the time. If you do not allow Facebook to access your location, the application can still infer your exact location only by grouping you with users who match the same vibration pattern as your phone's accelerometer records. "

The most serious of all is that even if we do not give it permission to obtain our location, Facebook can determine it based on all the huge amount of information it receives from hundreds of millions of devices like ours, which is why, technically, block the imposed tracking Apple can give us practically the same. That is why both researchers recommend removing the social network app from our iPhone.

Tom Mysk came to recognize that "on Facebook and Instagram it is not clear why the application reads the accelerometer; I could not find a way to deactivate it" so at this time, the only way to avoid the problem of the social network following collecting our data is to erase it from the device. Are you willing to do something like this to preserve your decision to avoid being tracked?

 

LINK: https://cincodias.elpais.com/cincodias/2021/10/25/lifestyle/1635136701_784521.html