Facebook has become synonymous with privacy violations in the year since Cambridge Analytica came to light. Now in the same week that details of the record $5 billion FTC fine emerged, an Australian cyber researcher has reopened a years-old debate as to whether the social media giant is embedding "hidden codes" in photos uploaded by users onto the site.
"Facebook is embedding tracking data inside photos you download," Edin Jusupovic claimed on Twitter, explaining he had "noticed a structural abnormality when looking at a hex dump of an image file from an unknown origin only to discover it contained what I now understand is an IPTC special instruction." The IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) sets technical publishing standards, including those for image metadata.
Jusupovic described this as a "shocking level of tracking," adding that "the take from this is that they can potentially track photos outside of their own platform with a disturbing level of precision about who originally uploaded the photo (and much more)."