If Apple were to have to grant all of these requests, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp could enable Meta to read on a user’s device all of their messages and emails, see every phone call they make or receive, track every app that they use, scan all of their photos, look at their files and calendar events, log all of their passwords, and more.
For those old enough to remember; once upon a time Facebook could essentially see everything on an iPhone. Over the years Apple introduced things such as app sandboxing that reduced FB’s ability to spy on users. Each time one of these changes were made FB cried foul that it was going to harm their business. And, technically, yes it would by increasing user privacy.
God knows they’d love to have the level of access they had a decade ago especially with the scale of the user base they have between all of Meta’s apps.
And this is why we you should not use Meta at all. if you do have to, you should only access Facebook through Firefox Focus or some other full-privacy browser.
I hope for more unreasonable interoperability requests between tech giants. DMA created a framework where innate corporate greed and legal resources will lead to tearing down the walls in areas where suing giant didn’t do so well compared to the competition.
It sounds like this mostly just tears down privacy protections for everyone who has a meta app installed though, no?
It’s EU so it’s not like this could happen without user explicitly opting in. iOS allows granular permissions so you’re in control of what you’re sharing. It’s the same old, same old for Apple, every consumer hostile behaviour they do is supposed to protect privacy.
The corporate shills’ comments under that article are gold.
