A former Meta product manager has claimed that the social network circumvented Apple’s privacy protections, as well as cheating advertisers, and fired him when he repeatedly raised the issue internally.
Meta is said to have found ways to identify Apple users even after they refused consent for app tracking, in order to avoid an estimated $10 billion loss of revenue …
App Tracking Transparency hit Meta hard
Meta relied heavily on selling personalized advertising, which required it to be able to target particular demographics and interest groups. This was achieved by tracking individual users across different apps.
Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) was introduced in 2021 and meant that companies required user permission in order to carry out this tracking. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of users declined.
It was estimated at the time that this would cost social media companies many billions of dollars, and Meta’s CFO warned investors that its own loss would be around $10B per year
Meta accused of bypassing protections
It was quickly alleged that Meta was using workarounds to continue to track users who had denied permission, alongside other privacy violations. A class action lawsuit followed.
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 Financial Times.
Meta secretly linked user data with other information to track users’ activity on other websites without their permission — despite Apple in 2021 introducing measures explicitly requiring consent, according to Purkayastha’s filings […]
A “closed and secretive” team at Meta is alleged to have used “deterministic matching” — gathering identifiable information that could then be used to connect data across multiple platforms in violation of Apple’s new privacy policies.
He also accuses Meta of inflating the value of sales achieved by advertising on its platforms.
Meta denies any wrongdoing, and claims that Purkayastha was dismissed for unrelated reasons. The tribunal was unable to rule immediately, and said a full hearing will be held later in the year.
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