Researchers discovered that Meta and Yandex's tracking codes, embedded in millions of websites, are de-anonymizing users by exploiting internet protocols. This allows the companies to circumvent Android's security measures and browser protections, linking browsing data from Chrome and other browsers to user identities in their respective apps. The tracking bypasses sandboxing and data partitioning, sending unique identifiers from the browser to native apps. Google is investigating this abuse, which began in 2017 for Yandex and last September for Meta.

Prepared by Jonathan Pierce and reviewed by editorial team.