iOS 14

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New Facebook Message Warns You of iOS 14 Ad Opt-In

Andrew Orr ·

In response to an iOS 14 feature that makes developers ask user consent to use their data, Facebook wants to remind people just how beleaguered it really is.

In the post, Facebook says that if users accept the prompts for Facebook and Instagram, the ads you see on those apps won’t change. “If you decline, you will still see ads, but they will be less relevant to you.” The tech giant notes that Apple has said that providing education about its new privacy changes is allowed.

To me, the most offensive part about this isn’t Facebook pretending to care about “businesses other than itself that rely on ads to reach products customers.” It’s how it says “This won’t give us access to new types of information.”

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How Apple Improved iMessage Security in iOS 14

Andrew Orr ·

Project Zero, Google’s security team, reverse-engineered iMessage to see how Apple improved it in its latest OS 14 releases. Specially, how it has gained new protections against zero-day attacks using BlastDoor, resliding of the shared cache, and exponential throttling.

One of the major changes in iOS 14 is the introduction of a new, tightly sandboxed “BlastDoor” service which is now responsible for almost all parsing of untrusted data in iMessages (for example, NSKeyedArchiver payloads). Furthermore, this service is written in Swift, a (mostly) memory safe language which makes it significantly harder to introduce classic memory corruption vulnerabilities into the code base.

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Google Still Doesn’t Have iOS 14 Privacy Labels

Andrew Orr ·

I’ve been hesitant to keep sharing these stories. At the time this news first appeared I was skeptical, saying that we just got over the holidays so give Google a break. But as the days turn into weeks, this is when it does start to look damning and now it’s time to give Google some heat.

On January 5, Google told TechCrunch that the data would be added to its iOS apps “this week or the next week,” but both this week and the next week have come and gone with no update. It has now been well over a month since Google last updated its apps.

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Facebook Warns of iOS 14 Privacy With App Banners

Andrew Orr ·

Facebook’s latest move is to display banners in its business apps saying there will be an impact to marketing efforts. In this case, the “users” that Mr. Espósito refers to in his article are the actual users—the advertisers. This banner is seen in Facebook Business Suite and Facebook Ads.  The problem with Facebook’s argument though is that, like Tim Cook tweeted, they can still track you across all the apps like before. What angers Mark Zuckerberg is user consent (sorry, product consent, products being the people that use Facebook).

The fact that Facebook is now showing these messages in its iOS apps criticizing Apple demonstrates that the company is trying to get popular appeal to change Apple’s mind about its new App Store privacy rules.