Businesses using WhatsApp, Instagram... automatically opt-in to website scraping & Meta making fake accounts!

2 days ago by MadeInDex 📰🌎 to c/privacy

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53252379

Businesses & affiliated entities should REALLY reconsider using ANY Meta product.

By using WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook... they now automatically opt-in to their websites getting scraped, collected & used to train (likely) MetaAI.

It includes the creation of fake accounts (so called test credentials¹) to gain further access, to restricted data.

Only options to opt-out:

  1. c/DeMeta
  2. Robots.txt with: User-agent: FacebookBot Disallow: / User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent Disallow: /

Source:

¹ https://www.facebook.com/...

METAdata!

Part 1 of the paragraph:

"You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them)..."

So this data can even be collected by 3rd parties working with Meta?

Part 2 of the paragraph:

...that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users' use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs in order to provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products...

"your or users' use" is especially concerning, as it is extremely loosely phrased and would cover a wide range of people.

Trilogy3452 3 points 2 days ago

Forgive my ignorance, do businesses not already expect scrapers to access their websites (assuming bots can ignore robots.txt)?

path: 0 26391227, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
privacy
privacy

@lemmy.ml

login for more options
51487
5303
4580

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

  • Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
  • Don't promote proprietary software
  • Try to keep things on topic
  • If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
  • Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
  • Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

go to feed...