Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/07/035249/washington-posts-privacy-tip-stop-using-chrome-delete-metas-apps-and-yandex

by miles • 1 year ago

472 318 1 year ago

tech.slashdot.org

_mlbt• 1 year ago

Safari reports that it blocked 16 trackers on WaPos home page. So it’s probably best to avoid them for privacy too.

politelemon3• 1 year ago

I wouldn't be using Safari if I were concerned about privacy. Privacy is more than just blocking trackers.

dlivingston2• 1 year ago

How is Safari anything but strong on privacy?

leereeves• 1 year ago

I hope people can get a "Stop Using Chrome" movement going, like we did with Internet Explorer long ago.

righthand4• 1 year ago

Idk, isn't that how we got Chrome? Isn't this inviting someone else to be the new Internet abuse daddy?

ljlolel2• 1 year ago

Sounds like something written by a Google employee. Mozilla is a non-profit

0x_rs• 1 year ago

No, that was Firefox. Chrome's spread was fueled by literal malware or spyware bundling it to get some of Google's sweet money and some of the most aggressive advertisement campaigns for any online product ever.

timewizard4• 1 year ago

Chrome is fine.

Letting an advertising company own it is not.

duxup3• 1 year ago

I feel like that's like saying "it's fine, except for the bad part that you can't avoid" ;)

userbinator2• 1 year ago

Maybe even a "start using Internet Explorer again" movement ;-)

For all the hate it got, IE was nowhere near as privacy-invasive as any of the "modern" browsers now, even Firefox. If you configured it to open with a blank page, it would quietly do so and make zero unsolicited network requests.

SoftTalker3• 1 year ago

Well IE (Edge) is Chrome now under the covers.

xnx2• 1 year ago

Source article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/06/06/meta-pr...

HelloUsername• 1 year ago

Source article

Thx. Even the source in the slashdot article links to msn...

bitpush2• 1 year ago

Written by the same person who wrote Washington Post article.

All very confusing.

xnx2• 1 year ago

Without the suggestion to install an adblocker, this is not credible advice.

ninth_ant• 1 year ago

A media outlet which depends on ad revenue as a primary income source is unlikely to suggest this.

Ditching these deeply invasive products remains a good idea, independent on any decision to use ad blockers or not.

The Meta/Yandex incident in particular is straight-up malware and everyone should remove their apps.

timewizard4• 1 year ago

which depends on ad revenue

They're more tightly bound than that. They're dependent on Google Display Ads. Which really makes their whole diatribe that much more pathetic.

Any media company that decided to traffic the ads themselves, from their own servers, and inline with their own content, would effectively be immune from ad blocking.

Ditching these deeply invasive products remains a good idea

While still allowing random third party javascript to run unchecked on a parent website.

alkonaut2• 1 year ago

Getting privacy advice from an adtech funded outlet sounds like reading democracy advice from the Chinese ruling party or vegetarianism advice from lions to be honest.

It might be correct-and-incomplete but they just have no credibility on the topic.

brookst• 1 year ago

You’re not wrong, but there was a time many of olds remember when editorial content and commercial concerns were firewalled. It used to be outrageous, and usually wrong, to suggest an editorial position was contingent upon a business benefit for the media outlet.

I miss those days.

account427• 1 year ago

A media outlet which depends on ad revenue as a primary income source is unlikely to suggest this.

That's a problem for the media outlet to solve. Ad-supported tech "news" can never be trustworthy.

jfengel• 1 year ago

Does the ad blocker prevent leaks of your information?

I know it blocks a use of your information against you (targeted ads). And any external source is a potential leak (e.g. the kinds of things that CORS is supposed to reduce).

But does an ad blocker specifically leak more, or just reduce the incentive to collect that information?

antithesizer• 1 year ago

Yes they block tracking

weaksauce• 1 year ago

they don't load up the ads at all so they can't know your information in the first place at least from the ads themselves. if the website is sharing information directly there's nothing you can do outside of some kind of vpn and never logging on to any services.

demosthanos2• 1 year ago

A full-featured ad blocker (uBlock Origin original, not the neutered Lite version that runs on Chrome now) will intercept requests at the network level and prevent your browser from requesting the advertisers' JavaScript code. Your browser not only won't show the ads, it won't run the code that was supposed to show them or even send a request to the advertisers' servers.

This blocks most existing tracking methods. The only thing you're not protected from is first-party tracking by the site you're actually visiting, which is impossible to fully protect against.

eastbound• 1 year ago

I think there was a Defcon where they showed that some ad networks let the advertiser themselves provide the image/video. By targeting only people who first visited a given website, they know who you are. And by adding selectors on the ad, they extract your characteristics, including location.

It looks very stretched, but the real magic happens when this data is sold in bulk. It allows recouping who is where. Your target person may or may not be in each dataset, their location isn’t known like clockwork, but that allows determining where they work, where they sleep and who they’re with. One ad is useless as a datapoint, but recouping shows reliable patterns. And remember most people on iPhone still don’t have an adblocker.

mingus88• 1 year ago

They will not bite the hand that feeds them.

But I am glad they are pushing people toward other browsers because that is the biggest step. Once you have taken that step, installing the most popular extensions is trivial.

Guess what the highest rated extensions are?

userbinator2• 1 year ago

The FBI recommends using an adblocker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41483581

ryandrake• 1 year ago

I would bet money that the techie they asked to put the list together included "use an adblocker." And then the higher-up who approves articles like this said "shit! wait... no, no, no, delete that one!!" These corporations are deeply deceptive.

godelski4• 1 year ago

The advice is fine, just incomplete.

It is better than nothing and definitely for the more "normies" advice. Let's start there and then we can get them onto adblock and other stuff.

Btw, the ArsTechnica article they link offers more advice[0]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/meta-and-yandex-are...

mmooss3• 1 year ago

That may not be viable for many non-technical users, which is their audience. On HN, it would be an error to omit ad blockers; the Washington Post has a different audience. I expect that most would find installing and learning a new browser to be too much effort and too hard to understand.

Larrikin• 1 year ago

This is provably wrong since Google has been pushing Chrome installs for over a decade.

theandrewbailey• 1 year ago

They suggest Brave browser, which has an adblocker built in and on by default.

greggsy• 1 year ago

It’s still good advice

arresin2• 1 year ago

What is the alternative to chrome that doesn’t crash or is not noticeably slower?

wyattblue• 1 year ago

Brave Browser: https://brave.com/

GolfPopper• 1 year ago

Brave has some controversies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...

slaw• 1 year ago

Firefox + uBlock Origin

azinman2• 1 year ago

I feel like people sleep on safari, especially on Macs.

hk13372• 1 year ago

JavaScript Chrome developers did a good job of convincing people that Safari is the new IE.

I love Safari on macOS. I love the pinch/zoom with the tabs. I love that private browsing mode, at least seems to, keep things contained to the tab they started with. e.g. if I open facebook in a private tab then open new tab and go to facebook, it’s going to make me login.

hxtk• 1 year ago

I tend to use Safari on my mac, but I will say that it evaluates CORS slightly differently than other browsers so that sometimes I have to disable CORS protection to get a site to work that works fine in Chrome or Firefox, and it's the only browser I've used where I expect to have it crash hard with a SEGFAULT or something every once in a while.

Aurornis2• 1 year ago

I continually try, but Safari is the only browser where I routinely experience crashes once or twice a month. There are also some random incompatibilities with certain websites (related to the CORS issue as mentioned in another comment) that force me back into another browser anyway.

arresin2• 1 year ago

Safari lags on implementing key web tech

haiku20772• 1 year ago

Doesn't crash? Firefox/Mullvad Browser is fine.

Not slower? Safari or Orion.

ramon156• 1 year ago

What's wrong with FireFox?

And if you're not a fan of FireFox, Ladybird is becoming a thing in 2026

wussboy• 1 year ago

Full time Firefox user. I run hundreds of tabs for days on end and need to restart it every week or so. Well worth it to not use Chrome. Need to open a site in Chrome about once a month

abhinavk• 1 year ago

The upcoming version has "Unload tabs" built in to the context menu. That should result in restarts limited to updates.

SoftTalker3• 1 year ago

I've used Firefox for years and it very rarely crashes. Individual tabs will crash occasionally, but rarely the entire browser.

brazzy• 1 year ago

Firefox.

NexRebular• 1 year ago

I use Vivaldi[1]. Also has built-in ad-blocker although I'm not sure how good it is compared to Ublock or others.

[1] https://vivaldi.com/

dijksterhuis• 1 year ago

seconded. been loving vivaldi since i switched.

secondcoming• 1 year ago

Firefox. It's been my default browser for years but now I'm noticing sites that don't work properly with it. I'm not sure why.

It also has a really annoying 'feature' that its update process will sometimes force you to restart the browser.

JumpCrisscross2• 1 year ago

I’m using Firefox and Kagi’s Orion browser [1] on my Mac and Safari on iOS.

[1] https://kagi.com/orion/

m-localhost2• 1 year ago

Is it easier to build a browser for MacOS? Arc was Mac only for the longest time, until they released a crippled Windows version. DuckDuckGo browser started Mac only.

dismalaf• 1 year ago

I like Vivaldi myself.

mrweasel• 1 year ago

Firefox? Weird question. I haven't even installed Chrome in the past 7 years. Firefox is fast (but I obviously don't know if Chrome is faster) and it never crashes.

dartharva• 1 year ago

Chrome does feel faster to me; I remember someone here saying that was because of some kind of procedural loading shenanigans or something.

But the main hook for me is how websites look. I do a lot of reading on the browser, and fonts on Chrome always look better than on Firefox. I would switch to Firefox in a heartbeat if only things started looking the same on it.

duxup3• 1 year ago

I use firefox full time, it works great for me.

0134340• 1 year ago

Well, for the past twenty years, Firefox has been a good alternative browser to Chrome, IE, etc.

guywithahat2• 1 year ago

I really like Brave, blocks youtube ads and generally just works where other chrome alternatives don't https://brave.com/download/

ronnier• 1 year ago

I'm pretty worried about the security of Brave and stopped using it. I'd like to be wrong. But years old patches missing in Chromium not ported over until recently makes me nervous (referring to a recently addressed long time websocket bug in Brave). What else is missing? It just seems to risky to use for me.

voytec3• 1 year ago

Zen Browser works well for me. It's a Firefox fork but privacy-focused whereas Mozilla recently became an ad company and published hostile TOS changes. No issues I had when I was evaluating LibreWolf.

cosmicgadget3• 1 year ago

Any browser that lets you block javascript? It is weird how we now call browsers fast because they can quickly render the most cancerous content.

17186274406• 1 year ago

In Firefox: about:config -> javascript.enabled = false

password4321• 1 year ago

I use Chrome for Google workspace, Firefox for ongoing personal logins, and Brave incognito for other browsing (restarting completely for a new session when changing gears).

Last week's discussion on a profile management tool offered several insights into how others a bit further down this path use their browsers of choice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44132752

mmooss3• 1 year ago

What experiences have you had with crashing, noticeably slower browsers? I haven't seen that in any modern browsers.

p0w3n3d2• 1 year ago

I've noticed that recent Chrome version does not allow me to download the pdf I'm viewing. I had to open it in Firefox. The Chrome browser only allowed me to save it to drive (cloud)

charcircuit• 1 year ago

Did you try finding a print button?

Henchman21• 1 year ago

To… save? I get that you can print to a file and it’ll save it that way of course, but damn that strikes me as really confusing for non-techies

Legend2440• 1 year ago

Seems weird. I'm in Chrome right now and I can right-click on PDFs and click save as.

p0w3n3d2• 1 year ago

I mean once you get into a pdf. Sometimes web page opens it instead of allowing download. The built-in pdf browser of chrome has no option to save it locally on android phone. I have not been not precise in explaining, because I find Google and Android constantly reducing my ownership of my own phone and that's another brick in the wall here

Aurornis2• 1 year ago

I downloaded a PDF within updated Chrome earlier this morning without problems. I would be looking at your setup to see what makes it unique.

Grazester• 1 year ago

You can absolutely download PDFs on the all Chrome versions including the most recent. You need to do is set chrome to download them instead of open them.

I am a developer but have to deal with questions on this regularly from people's at my company due to the IT department being small.

gosub1002• 1 year ago

I have the opposite problem: I want to simply render the pdfs so I can, you know, read them. not download them like they are data to be fed into another app.

NHQ2• 1 year ago

Web browsers should become outmoded soon. It was fine for bootstrapping the web, but now to keep up a browser must emulate the operating system and more in a single app. This pressure is the centralizing factor in browser dominance. Ditch the features, drop the spy protocol (http), just get the files.

thethimble• 1 year ago

What will the alternative to web browsers be after they become "outmoded"?

consumer451• 1 year ago

I can't speak for the user who you are responding to, but an AI maxi might believe that an AI powered interface will take over all information retrieval.

zahlman3• 1 year ago

the spy protocol (http)

I'm afraid I can't guess your reasoning.

NHQ2• 1 year ago

How do i turn it off?

ck2• 1 year ago

supermium --ungoogled-supermium

https://win32subsystem.live/supermium/

https://github.com/win32ss/supermium

pmdr2• 1 year ago

First time reading about this, thank you!

TiredOfLife• 1 year ago

Washington Post also called Ukraines attack on russian bombers "dirty"

cosmicgadget3• 1 year ago

Can you elaborate?

extra88• 1 year ago

That's one opinion from one columnist. Also, the full phase was "dirty war," by which they seem to mean one dominated by covert operations by intelligence services rather than conventional forces, on both sides.

jeffbee• 1 year ago

It's sort of interesting that Brave was not affected by this because they already blocked the technique used by the Yandex app. I wonder if Brave devs were aware of that specific abuse, or if they just thought that localhost traffic was distasteful categorically.

testfrequency• 1 year ago

I really wish I was ok, morally, with using Brave.

One of the few that seem to have their shit together

throwaway290• 1 year ago

Firefox in strict mode should be unaffected?

meroes• 1 year ago

Hmm how can I use being forced to use Chrome for work, for me tax wise…

If I’m a contractor forced to use Chrome and mobile devices, can I deduct a separate work phone?

I really hate having it my iPhone, at least maybe I can claw something back this way?

0_____0• 1 year ago

I believe it is good form to keep work and personal machines completely separate, including phones. If you ever have to hand over your devices for discovery in a law suit I think you will come to the same conclusion.

Xorakios• 1 year ago

I very much agree. Retired now but I used to have a separate phone for each major client for HIPAA compliance but it's good advice everywhere (and $50 year-old android phones and $15/month Tracfone accounts aren't just for criminals!)

jhbadger• 1 year ago

And stop using Alexa (of course Bezos' paper wouldn't say that!)

m-localhost2• 1 year ago

Zen Browser (FF) on Win and Firefox on iOS (for sync) works well for me. Edge for all M365 related stuff. Still use Chrome for web dev. Not sure what to move on in that regard...

t-writescode2• 1 year ago

I'm a relatively new web dev and I've been quite happy with Firefox's Web Dev tools. What does Chrome's dev tools give someone that Firefox's doesn't? I can edit css on the fly, see where a css rule is being overwritten, debug javascript, etc.

arealaccount• 1 year ago

FF dev tools just don’t work sometimes, notably with iframes, sometimes with source maps, and other edge case types things.

I use FF for 99% of dev, open Chrome maybe once a quarter. It’s a better browser.

nine_k• 1 year ago

One an develop in FF, but has to test in Chrome. (Same with developing in Chrome and also testing in FF.)

elendee2• 1 year ago

firefox doesnt have Workspaces. I do 100% of my CSS in Chrome Workspaces

politelemon3• 1 year ago

I use FF but Chrome's dev tools have a lot more going for it including memory profiling and performance tools. On the other hand, Chrome's network panel is awful and it's a chore to see the domains and full URLs involved.

jhasse3• 1 year ago

Brave?

ajsnigrutin• 1 year ago

For most people in the west, using yandex and chinese alternatives would be better than local ones, because neither china nor russia has any auhority over you, while your local agencies do.

Wobbles42• 1 year ago

This. Separation of concerns is a good thing. In this case "people who spy on you" and "people who kick your door in and shoot your dog".

thadk2• 1 year ago

Anyone have tips on how to avoid having the WhatsApp app on your phone?

tdiff• 1 year ago

Use telegram

sneak2• 1 year ago

Telegram is a privacy downgrade from WhatsApp. WA is at least end to end encrypted; Telegram is not.

capyba2• 1 year ago

Why telegram instead of signal?

rixed• 1 year ago

The app you have to pay premium to prevent them from selling your details to advertisers and scammers? Ha yes I totally trust them.

baobun• 1 year ago

Give your WA contacts alternative contact method. Uninstall. Stop using WhatsApp.

gman83• 1 year ago

Try having kids in Europe, everything they do is organized through WhatsApp group chats. I had to get a separate burner phone just for that.

soraminazuki• 1 year ago

Remove lock-ins that forces people to use a specific chat app. Move private communication away from "platforms" to interoperable protocols. That is the only way for us to regain control over our own private communications.

politelemon3• 1 year ago

The question may need a little more context - it's easy to avoid by simply uninstalling it. If you're actually asking how to minimize its presence, consider using an app like Island which isolates the apps into a separate profile which can't see anything in your main profile.

thadk2• 1 year ago

I hadn't heard of that one, thanks: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details

ChrisArchitect• 1 year ago

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/06/06/meta-pr...

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115

ThinkBeat• 1 year ago

I dont yet understand this attack.

The WP article says:

"" Millions of websites contain a string of computer code from Meta that compiles your web activity. It might capture the income you report to the government, your application for a student loan and your online shopping. ""

If I read that correctly then they are capturing all https web content you access in clear text and uploads it all to Meta? Then Meta

I thought the exploit was used to track where you visited, not the full data of each webpage.

bink• 1 year ago

It does sound fantastical. A piece of code that can violate the same origin policy would be a huge vulnerability. Meta could be working with other sites to share data on users via code running on both sites, but snooping on tax data without the IRS helping? Unlikely.

I can only assume they're suggesting that companies like Intuit and H&R Block are sharing this data with Meta, but that seems like a huge violation of privacy and with tax data it might even be illegal.

macNchz2• 1 year ago

It's effectively malware—this article has some more detail: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/meta-and-yandex-are...

Basically, they created a channel between the browser and a localhost webserver running in their native apps, by abusing the ability to set arbitrary metadata on WebRTC connections. That way, they were able to exfiltrate tracking cookies out of the browser's sandbox to the native app, where they could be associated with your logged-in user identity.

helph67• 1 year ago

Thirty months old but I'm guessing they haven't improved! https://www.techradar.com/news/nearly-half-of-all-online-tra...

keernan• 1 year ago

If we truly lived in a democracy which 'obeyed' the overwhelming will of the people, there would be laws with 'horrific' penalties for any effort to track devices or people online.

aucisson_masque2• 1 year ago

What about the other app ? Now that this trick is known, either it’s completely fixed, including in system webview, or all the other usual spyware ,that the play store is full of, are going to use it to track their user.

Google still hasn’t fixed the issue of app being able to list all other installed app on your phone without requiring permission despite having been reported months ago. They didn’t even provide an answer.

I believe Google isn’t interested in Android user privacy in any way, even when it’s to their own benefit.

At this point either use iPhone, grapheneos or no phone at all.

MrDresden• 1 year ago

Google still hasn’t fixed the issue of app being able to list all other installed app on your phone without requiring permission despite having been reported months ago. They didn’t even provide an answer.

Since the first release of Android it has been possible to query for installed applications on the device, and since Android 11 those results have started to be filtered[0] (with some exceptions[1]).

So which issue exactly are you talking about?

[0] https://medium.com/androiddevelopers/package-visibility-in-a...

[1] https://developer.android.com/training/package-visibility/au...

aucisson_masque2• 1 year ago

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/thre...

Basically no answer but an a.i generated one and someone promising to get back in touch since 24 of march.

Who are they kidding ?

capyba2• 1 year ago

I don’t know anyone that works at Meta, so I’m hoping that someone here could answer this for me-

What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? You're spying on people, no? Surveilling ordinary people, not enemy combatants or foreign militaries? Perhaps a friend of a friend or even a family member? This kind of thing is so creepy and disturbing to me, not that it’s anything new…

kb_dev• 1 year ago

In principle, I think most people believe their morals would prevent them from working at a company like Meta.

On the flip side, how much are morals worth if you have the opportunity to be financially free?

There's also the opportunity to work on interesting problems.

Anecdotally, of course, I know a Meta engineer at the L7 level (generally staff engineer in these large tech companies). He makes over seven figures a year, 75% of that being from stocks. The money is there.

godelski4• 1 year ago

Are the people working on the interesting problems doing most of the spying?

I'm sure there's overlap like people working on AR scraping images of people's homes to build better models but they also do a ton of research where they use open datasets.

I'm curious what this distribution is.

I'm also curious what the answer is for just average programmers. Meta has like 70k employees. Surely a lot of them aren't doing interesting stuff

leksak• 1 year ago

I am not even sure most people could articulate their morals. It's not just about never having heard about things as moral absolutism or consequentialism. Similar to how atrophied people's understanding of sympathy and empathy is as well.

EMM_3862• 1 year ago

What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this?

I got this exact thought IMMEDIATLY (yet again) and posted on it here as well, putting my two cents in.

This is totally unacceptable for a software engineer to implement features like this simply because their company told them to, doing what the company tells them to makes them money, so they do it.

No apparent thought into whether they are creating is harmful, or caring about it.

I've given up on any anger directed towards the company itself. They will make money any way they can. Now, the engineers who actually implement it bothers me, because it is clearly not something that should be built.

To me, I don't care how much I'm being paid or how bad it would be to lose my job at that time.

I would resign before working on features like this and deal with the consequences.

thatguy0900• 1 year ago

History suggests there is no shortage of people who will throw all semblance of morality away as long as they are surrounded by people who they believe have done the same. I almost think the people who are not willing to cave in this way are the rare ones.

ethagnawl2• 1 year ago

I've heard people justify working there (often to themselves) by saying things like, "If I don't do it, someone else will. So, I may as well do it and make virtuous use of the money."

I think some people also tell themselves that they'll be agents of change and fix things from within but that almost always winds up being another self delusion at worst and impossibility at best. There was a certain amount of this on display in Careless People.

potamic• 1 year ago

There are many industries which are inherently hostile to users, insurance, betting, marketing, etc. If you ask people if they feel good about enabling the kind of things these companies tend to do, you probably won't get an answer. I don't think Meta is an outlier here nor are they the only one. Even across other industries you will find many questionable practices in usual operations. If pushing the boundaries of ethics gives a business an advantage, you can guarantee that someone will be doing it, and eventually most will be doing it. It's simply the natural tendency of any system with competing entities. The question we should rather be asking is, how do we tweak the system. What can be done to disincentivize pushing the boundary like this?

_DeadFred_• 1 year ago

The question is how did a social media company end up so shitty it is now compared/it's behavior equated to insurance companies? Insurance companies are required to control payout, and people expect that. The level of stuff Meta does is not required, nor do people think/realize it is as hostile to them as an insurance company.

In the past, people aspired to work at cool tech companies. Devs aren't lining up to work at insurance companies. I never worked in the industry I went to school for because the only jobs when I got out of school were for weapons. At this point I feel the same way about social media, I would never work at such a 'make the world as bad as you can get away with' industry.

whstl7• 1 year ago

The sad reality is that this behavior gets normalized in the name of making money.

For employees it gets normalized at the first signal that your livelihood might be affected if you don't comply.

As someone who's privacy conscious, it's an uphill battle to convince co-workers to actually follow laws instead of trying to find loopholes.

I've worked at places who collect every possible data point and distributes it willy nilly in Excel spreadsheets posted in Slack. I raised it to a CISO and the response was "all that information is available for everyone anyway via the interface". I know a German company requires you to "accept" data collection and processing in order to settle a debt. I reported this to their legal department which I personally knew a person and they said they'd "look into it ASAP" two years ago.

In the end people just roll along with it. I know this is unpopular, but the only forward I see way to prevent this from happening seems to be using courts and tightened legislation.

blitzar3• 1 year ago

behavior gets normalized in the name of making money

If Pavlov's dog gets a big fat steak everytime it bites someone ...

phyzome• 1 year ago

Instead of reporting it to their legal department, report it to an EU data privacy regulator.

(I know this wasn't your main point.)

wat100004• 1 year ago

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

If understanding that it’s wrong to invade people’s privacy is incompatible with keeping your job, you probably won’t understand it.

Chris2048• 1 year ago

I know a German company requires you to "accept" data collection and processing in order to settle a debt.

Pretty sure this is illegal, and probably a liability e.g. if it came up in court.

godelski4• 1 year ago

It's not a complete answer but I've seen talking about the costs help. That's what's making them overlook things anyways.

What they see is dollars now but not dollars later. Often these data issues can rise to the level that it could destroy the entire business. You might be called a party pooper, but truth is people like this want to keep the party going. It's hard to understand that sometimes keeping the party going means saying no. But it's just the same dealing with drunk people, say no by saying yes to something else. Like presenting another solution. Though that's way easier said than done...

Just remember, everyone is on the same team. People don't say "no" because they don't want to make more money. A good engineer says "no" a lot because your job is to find solutions. It usually sounds like "I don't think that'll work but we might be about to...". If you stop listening without hearing the "but" you can't solve problems, you can only ignore them. Which *that* is not being a team player.

We're always rushing and the truth is that doing good is much harder than doing bad or "evil". I put it in quotes because it's very easy to do things that are obviously evil post hoc but was done by someone trying hard to do good. So I find this language to be a problem because it is easy to dismiss with "I'm not a bad person" and "I'm trying to do good". Truth is that's not enough. Truth is mistakes happen. We work with asymmetric information. It only becomes your fault when you recognize and don't take steps to fix it (or active ignorance).

Sometimes things take nuance. Sometimes it takes more than a few sentences to convey. But who reads longer anyways?

bloomca• 1 year ago

Money, it's just business. I think every big corp is morally bankrupt (otherwise they wouldn't be big). There are some exceptions, of course, if a company found a sustainable way to monetize their output.

But the baseline is really bad.

michaelteter• 1 year ago

This is basically it. There are a dozen ways to become huge, and they all are essnetially anti-humanity.

There's an expression: normalization of deviance.

This is where we are now. People idolize others because of their wealth, and that wealth is always gained by means which are ultimately harmful to the greater population. Even the wealthy philanthropistMS which will remain unnamed acquired their greatness by cheating and stealing. But as long as you make a great show and give it all away eventually (while living lavishly the entire time), you look good.

jajko2• 1 year ago

Its way less bad than some investors ie on Wall street or arms/military business, by huge margin. Folks scamming old people out of money or encrypting their HDDs for ransom should be shot in sight. But - this topic affects billions very directly, and its not about the effect now, but helping general direction which is outright evil by any moral standards.

I can pull out usual godwin's law plug but I guess we all know what would be there. People like to feel great about themselves, its subconscious. And if slightly tilting reality in their favor can achieve that then what's the problem, right. Again, this is not a conscious decision so most don't even notice that, and who would complain about feeling better about themselves.

Old enough, when you want to see such things like these biases in people around you, its very easy once you start looking for them. I guess we really are all heroes of our own stories (but what I mention is far from uniformly distributed, some folks are really stellar human beings and some opposite)

wat100004• 1 year ago

Big companies are paperclip maximizers, for money instead of paperclips. It’s strange how many people can see the danger of a hypothetical nonhuman intelligence with a goal of making as many paperclips as possible, but not the danger of actual nonhuman intelligences with the goal of making as much money as possible.

blitzar3• 1 year ago

What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this?

A big house, a fast car, more money.

Where else in SV are you going to go anyway? Every company does the same thing.

procaryote3• 1 year ago

Finding a company less bad for the world than Meta isn't very hard. They pay really well to compensate, so people will rationalise working there of course, but "everyone does it" is just a way to dodge responsibility for your own choices

If you value money over other people, it's a great place to work though

et-al2• 1 year ago

Where else in SV are you going to go anyway? Every company does the same thing.

That's like saying mechanical engineers can only work at Raytheon or Lockheed Martin. Or biotech people can only work at Purdue Pharma.

There are companies in SV who are making products for actual users. Just look outside adtech.

gsky3• 1 year ago

Some engineers do anything for money. Check out teamblind.com to know the evil side of engineers

ReptileMan• 1 year ago

It should be noted that no ethically -trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

palmfacehn• 1 year ago

Generally employees put the responsibility on management. As everyone has a higher up they answer to, no one feels personally responsible. From the top down, the concerns of how things are actually implemented are often too abstract. Combine these dynamics with institutional echochambers and group-think.

Employees just want to make it to the weekend. Execs want to hit their targets. Sales dept. needs their bonuses. The board wants to pump valuations.

whstl7• 1 year ago

Not Meta but I once got yelled at not by a real manager, but by a PM because I said I wouldn't let the team do something shady without legal signing off. I'm in Europe so it was GDPR related.

The PM tried shopping the task to other teams, but nobody took the bait after I raised it publicly, and both legal and the external law firm sided with me after about three months of delay.

In the meantime I raised the topic of yelling with HR but every step of the way the company made me feel like I was the one in the wrong for not complying.

I believe if I were meeker I would probably have complied right there.

fittingopposite• 1 year ago

Yes. Was my same first thought. Same thing that happened in Germany: "The banality of evil" how Hannah Arendt described Adolf Eichmann's excuse that he didn't bare any responsibility since he was just doing his job...

et-al2• 1 year ago

Eh, software engineers throughout the ZIRP had the choice of working at plenty of companies. People chose to work at Facebook for the money disregarding all other concerns. That's it.

porridgeraisin• 1 year ago

Optimization with the objectives we have today, and more generally financialism are all about splitting up end-to-end tasks into pieces and removing redundant common work. This is obviously good...upto a point. It gets bad because morals and a bunch of other stuff also gets split up.

Like someone mentioned below, it's unrealistic to expect people to think about second or third or nth order effects of their job. Heck, those effects are not even visible in 90% of cases.

To answer your question, the engineer at meta is just building a graph database. It takes a `void* node_data` as argument. Another is just building a kafka-clickhouse data pipeline that can transfer so many millions of `void* message`s a minute. The android engineer is just improving the percentage of requests without location data by using wifi ssids as fallback. The CEO just sees "advertising revenue WoW" in his dashboard. And so on. That it is actually being used for spying is many steps away from each of them -- OK, in the case of meta I'm sure the employees know to an extent. But it's still very different from the feeling they would get if they were doing the end-to-end task themselves.

It's the same thing with other questionable products. It's split up sufficiently across the supply chain that no one is actually aware enough of the task end-to-end.

In some cases, the same participant in the supply chain will be a supplier for something really good and necessary..but they will also be a supplier for something despicable. In this case, it is easy for everyone involved to sweep the latter under the rug.

As far as I have thought about it, there is no way to get rid of this larger problem without also losing the (unfathomably massive) benefits.

sneak2• 1 year ago

Same thing at Google or Apple. Google has everyone’s email and browsing history, Apple has the complete copy of everyone’s iMessage and SMS history (in the non-e2ee iCloud backups, readable by Apple).

Anything these companies know, the FBI and CIA can know, without a warrant thanks to FAA702 (did we all forget about PRISM?).

The state now has leverage over almost every normal citizen, thanks to what these companies have built.

Turnkey tyranny. Built by silicon valley.

msgodel2• 1 year ago

I know it's not so hip here but the answer is money. You go to work for money. It's not to socialize, not for personal growth, and not for charity. If I want those things I have hobbies (including hobby programming.)

averageRoyalty• 1 year ago

Most people would say no if they were offered a full time salary to spy on their friends, steal their data and act in a overtly unethical way every day. But these companies give them an abstraction layer.

There are plenty of things you can do for money that are not (or are significantly less) unethical.

laweijfmvo• 1 year ago

+1 for “money”. how many years until AI makes everyone’s job obsolete? do you really think countries like the US have their citizens’ best interests in mind? i’m guessing Forced Meaningless Labor (like the cartoon prisoners hammering rocks) is more probable than Universal Basic Income.

adolph• 1 year ago

What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this?

Would someone explain in plain language what is wrong with an app listening on a port for messages from the browser? It seems like a helpful asynchronous method to maintain state between browser and app.

grumpymuppet• 1 year ago

I'm nearly certain it's the dopamine response of "solving problems" coupled with the fear of losing a paycheck.

Morality isn't a consideration.

doctorpangloss• 1 year ago

Nobody is stopping you from making whatever you want and putting it out there in the world. If you believe strongly in a different order of things, go for it!

mcculley• 1 year ago

It is the same process whereby websites deploy Google Analytics. They are getting value by harming their users. They easily rationalize and justify it.

bluesnowmonkey• 1 year ago

You start with small moral compromises. That prepares you for big ones.

dagmx• 1 year ago

Meta pays a lot. Most people there don’t work on the shady stuff and don’t pay attention to what else is going on.

That’s generally the case for everyone I know who works there.

Many of them are even quite liberal and will join protests for things that Meta has actively and negatively played a part in, so they’re in effect protesting their own workplace indirectly. But will continue to work there because they can compartmentalize this.

Workaccount22• 1 year ago

No snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche

- "I didn't write it, I just had the idea"

- "I didn't implement it, I just made the prototype"

- "It wasn't my product, I just fixed some bugs with it"

- "I can't track everything in these implementation updates, I just work with what I am given"

- "I didn't collect the data, I just deal with what is in the dataset"

bigyabai2• 1 year ago

The snowflakes don't run the company. If you work somewhere that is designing a really big gun and the CEO uses it to commit an awful crime, you don't share the blame for one person's irresponsibility. It's not a satisfying answer, but it really is up to executives to decide where they draw the line. Nobody else in the business can say 'no'.

Likewise, when we blame IBM for supplying the Nazis during WWII, we're not decrying the enthusiastic early database workers. They aren't the problem; executives without morals are.

Fairburn• 1 year ago

Doubtful someone from Meta would admit to anything.

lazyeye• 1 year ago

Here's a senior ex-Facebook exec detailing how the company would betray users in the US to the CCP to help gain access to the Chinese market:-

https://youtu.be/f3DAnORfgB8

amongst other things...

akomtu• 1 year ago

The same reason people eat meat. The reality of what happens behind the scenes to produce meat or their paycheck is carefully hidden from their sight, and when it's hidden, it's easy to convince ourselves that we aren't some monsters who run concentration camps with cows and pigs in them, but decent humans who have taste for medium rare steaks.

What Meta does to society is more insidious: it gets people addicted to content so it can make them eat a poison for their minds, so-called ads. Surveillance is just method of making the ads more invasive, tailored to each user individually.

NBJack• 1 year ago

You may find the book Careless People a good read. The culture there is...troubling. From the top down.

shadowgovt• 1 year ago

It's hard to feel you're doing something wrong when the people are literally handing you their private data to sift through.

That's the onramp to normalization: "If the users didn't like this, they'd stop us."

17186274406• 1 year ago

Pretty sure, that if they use a Meta product, they are also deploying the spyware to themselves.

1vuio0pswjnm76• 1 year ago

Text-only, no Javascript:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1GecPs

geraldhh2• 1 year ago

unformatted html with sugar is not really helpful to humans, is it?

1vuio0pswjnm76• 1 year ago

If the response is JSON where the JSON values contain HTML, then is the response "JSON" or "HTML".

I would call this response "JSON" not "HTML".

The JSON is unformatted, i.e., no "prettyPrint".

The text-only browser I use to read HTML works with this JSON, it is easy to read, because the JSON values contain HTML tags.

EMM_3862• 1 year ago

If any software engineers out there are working on things like this I can only pray they STOP and think about why what they are doing. Implementing features by having to jump through hoops, just so that their employer can better spy on people and make more money.

That is so wrong, on so many levels ... I personally couldn't do it.

I hate this even more than NSO Group's Pegasys, which could easily get people killed. I'm ok with my reasoning, and I really hate that one as well.

Here, with Meta and Yandex, you see what you always see.

As soon as people catch on, they immediately remove it. But they will keep using it until that day comes.

For money, while trying to hide it from the users they are spying on.

It's greedy and evil and whoever in these companies think up these ideas should be let go. Immediately, in a perfect world.

Instead they'll just try another approach.

While everyone else has to clean up this latest one.

"Following public disclosure, Meta ceased using this method on June 3, 2025. Browser vendors like Chrome, Brave, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo have implemented or are developing mitigations, but a full resolution may require OS-level changes and stricter enforcement of platform policies to prevent further abuse."

klipklop• 1 year ago

Always funny how nearly universally Meta employees are quiet and never defend their companies practices..

The silence says a lot.

pmdr2• 1 year ago

Silence keeps food on the table.

flanked-evergl• 1 year ago

They make something people want. Most people I know thah use it, including me, just don't really see that big a downside to using it.

I'm not even slightly considering removing any Meta app, and let's face it, Firefox is over as a project because their priorities are all out of wack.

So Chrome and meta apps all the way for me, but I'm sure to listen to the Amazon Washington Post as to how I should treat Amazon competitors in the future.

const_cast2• 1 year ago

This is such a foreign perspective to me that I legitimately cannot even conceptualize it.

I've used Facebook products. Even just barring the privacy concerns, there's been one constant - the products are bad. They're not good. They actively make my life worse. They're not fun, they're not enjoyable, they're not performant, they're not... anything.

Even if I was a complete 100% sellout and I didn't give a single fuck about privacy, I wouldn't use Facebook products. Because they're just that bad.

Also Firefox is "over" as a project? Legitimately, what the fuck are you talking about? Firefox works fine and has been working fine for as long as I've used it. The browser works, and for all intents and purposes, I can't tell the difference from Chrome. Really, I can't. Are there differences? Probably. I've never encountered any, so for my money Firefox is fine.

swat535• 1 year ago

Why would they say anything ? and how are they any different from Google employees, weapon manufacturer employees, 3 letter agency employees, etc?

Everything can be justified given enough money. There is no such thing as objective morality.

righthand4• 1 year ago

WaPo’s reputation so tarnished they have other outlets reporting for them? I don’t understand why a slashdot article has WaPo in the headline. Are they some authority on privacy?

DidYaWipe2• 1 year ago

Never used Chrome, and don't use Meta apps... and when I did, I did not give them any real information.

I'm disgusted by the number of people giving real personal information to these assholes. "Open"AI insisted that you give them a real, functioning phone number to use ChatGPT. No goddamned way.

Ylpertnodi2• 1 year ago

I didn't give open ai my number...because i wouldn't have. Works fine for me (though i do use deepseek more, nowadays.

DidYaWipe2• 1 year ago

That is a recent change. Originally I tried various workarounds, including Google Voice and burner apps... but "Open"AI rejected them.

gsky3• 1 year ago

Gmail should be at the top of the list

HocusLocus• 1 year ago

It's CREEPY to imagine the Internet is under a mandate to protect your privacy. Don't be CREEPY.

The EU cookie fiasco is just that. All of a sudden, your every day experience was derailed extremely in a way that 'broke' HTML standards and sites at first in hundreds of ways. All of a sudden sites that never did track users were forced to start tracking them -- in order to set the flag to suppress the harassing cookie warning. Ironically, they will remember your cookie settings if you 'sign up'. Meanwhile nothing became more secure or private. It was just a way for the EU to virtue signal out loud and be annoying. It throws the user into sitespace to navigate the site's own cookie settings. It's theater.

Meanwhile, advanced fingerprinting is, well uhm, advanced. If the EU cared about cookie privacy a better course of action would have been to see whether browsers were locked down with best anti-fingerprinting possible and local cookie dialogues... and certify the ones that were. Educate users, harass them one time.

huijzer• 1 year ago

Yes if the EU’s aim was to just throw sand in the machine that is called society, then it seems they did a splendid job.

gherkinnn• 1 year ago

All of a sudden sites that never did track users were forced to start tracking them -- in order to set the flag to suppress the harassing cookie warning.

How is this true? You don't need a cookie warning if you're not tracking or doing other nastiness. A cookie banner is not required for functions like user sessions or keeping track of a shopping art.

jhasse3• 1 year ago

All of a sudden sites that never did track users were forced to start tracking them -- in order to set the flag to suppress the harassing cookie warning.

If the site never tracked the user, they wouldn't need to show the cookie banner in the first place.

Ylpertnodi2• 1 year ago

The 'fiasco' is for your benefit. If you don't like the banners, get a blocker or don't visit sites that track you. It's a pissy thing to add, but do you also get upset with places that have "This area is under video surveillance for your [cough] security"?

miohtama• 1 year ago

https://getfirefox.com

downsplat2• 1 year ago

Yes. Especially on Android, FF with uBlock Origin is the superpower.

For this particular issue: Three dots > Extensions > uBlock Origin > Open dashboard > Filter list > Privacy, enable "Block Outsider Intrusion into LAN".

JKCalhoun• 1 year ago

I like the succinctness of it. Reminded me of "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" as Michael Pollan says about dieting.

jgalt212• 1 year ago

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.

A bit wishy washy. They are still tracking you, just not as effectively as before.

cuncurrenzio• 1 year ago

There is a data pipe directly into the PNNL from Meta. Do your research!

kstrauser4• 1 year ago

I don’t want to. You do it for me: post a link to what you’re talking about.

cuncurren6zio• 1 year ago

There is a data pipe directly into the PNNL from Meta. Do your research!

sershe• 1 year ago

What I wonder is (from someone who has been in a room like that, not speculation), how do these decisions go down?

My other favorite example is un-disabling telemetry, resetting default browser, etc. Some PM or VP is in a meeting saying we are going to do this shady user hostile thing and everyone just nods? What is the amount and type of euphemisation?

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in one of these..

egberts1• 1 year ago

All boils down to Chrome leveraging localhost for its location.

Washington Post's Privacy Tip: Stop Using Chrome, Delete Meta Apps (and Yandex)

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