Investigators have unveiled a novel method to secretly monitor Android users. Both Meta and Yandex had been utilizing it, but have abruptly ceased now that they have been exposed.

The information is compelling and merits thorough examination:

>Tracking scripts that Meta and Yandex, based in Russia, embed in millions of websites are revealing visitor identities by exploiting legitimate Internet protocols, leading Chrome and other browsers to stealthily send unique identifiers to native applications installed on a device, researchers have found. Google has stated it is probing the malpractice, which enables Meta and Yandex to transform transient web identifiers into enduring mobile app user identities.

The clandestine tracking­executed in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica trackers­permits Meta and Yandex to circumvent essential security and privacy safeguards offered by both the Android operating system and the browsers operating on it. Android sandboxing, for example, segregates processes to prevent them from interfacing with the OS and any other applications on the device, thereby restricting access to sensitive information or privileged system resources. Safeguards such as state partitioning and storage partitioning, integrated into all major browsers, maintain site cookies and other data linked to a website in containers that are specific to each top-level website domain, ensuring they remain inaccessible to any other site.

Washington Post piece.