{"id":49697,"date":"2025-10-20T16:50:16","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T20:50:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=49697"},"modified":"2025-10-20T16:50:16","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T20:50:16","slug":"meta-allegedly-bypassed-app-tracking-transparency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/20\/meta-allegedly-bypassed-app-tracking-transparency\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta Allegedly Bypassed App Tracking Transparency"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/9to5mac.com\/2025\/08\/21\/meta-allegedly-bypassed-apple-privacy-measure-and-fired-employee-who-flagged-it\/\">Ben Lovejoy<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/9to5mac.com\/2025\/08\/21\/meta-allegedly-bypassed-apple-privacy-measure-and-fired-employee-who-flagged-it\/\"><p>A former Meta product manager has claimed that the social network circumvented Apple&rsquo;s privacy protections, as well as cheating advertisers, and fired him when he repeatedly raised the issue internally.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>It was quickly alleged that <a href=\"https:\/\/9to5mac.com\/2022\/09\/22\/app-tracking-transparency-workaround\/\">Meta was using workarounds<\/a> to continue to track users who had denied permission, alongside <a href=\"https:\/\/9to5mac.com\/2022\/08\/24\/facebook-privacy-3\/\">other privacy violations<\/a>. A class action lawsuit followed.<\/p><p>A fired product manager at the company, Samujjal Purkayastha, has now taken his case to an employment tribunal claiming he was unlawfully dismissed for raising concerns about the practice, reports the <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/be6a99d2-22de-48ec-9afa-1d2e2f709afc\">Financial Times<\/a><\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Meta, of course, says this is nonsense and that he wasn&rsquo;t fired for being a whistleblower. My takeaway continues to be that Apple should not be presenting privacy information to its customers that sounds authoritative but which it has no way to verify or enforce.<\/p>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/31\/tea-and-the-app-store\/\">Tea and the App Store<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/29\/app-tracking-transparency-doesnt-stop-trackers\/\">App Tracking Transparency Doesn&rsquo;t Stop Trackers<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/28\/app-tracking-transparency-affecting-facebook\/\">App Tracking Transparency Affecting Facebook<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/02\/app-tracking-transparencys-honor-system\/\">App Tracking Transparency&rsquo;s Honor System<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/02\/01\/misleading-and-inaccurate-ios-privacy-labels\/\">Misleading and Inaccurate iOS Privacy Labels<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ben Lovejoy: A former Meta product manager has claimed that the social network circumvented Apple&rsquo;s privacy protections, as well as cheating advertisers, and fired him when he repeatedly raised the issue internally.[&#8230;]It was quickly alleged that Meta was using workarounds to continue to track users who had denied permission, alongside other privacy violations. A class [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2025-10-20T20:50:19Z","apple_news_api_id":"9858ec3d-db31-475e-8c8f-b9d97497b4fa","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2025-10-20T20:50:19Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AmFjsPdsxR16Mj7nZdJe0-g","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[354,2065,101,25,31,2586,26,41,209,2137,355,2810],"class_list":["post-49697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-advertising","tag-app-tracking-transparency","tag-business","tag-facebook","tag-ios","tag-ios-18","tag-iosapp","tag-lawsuit","tag-legal","tag-meta","tag-privacy","tag-privacy-nutrition-labels"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49697"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49698,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49697\/revisions\/49698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}