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What the actual fuck? How is this not a violation of my privacy expectations, and how is this justified?

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Aug 30, 2019

Facebook scans system libraries from their Android app user’s phone in the background and uploads them to their server This is called "Global Library Collector" at Facebook, known as "GLC" in app’s code It periodically uploads metadata of system libraries to the server

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Justin Schuh

@justinschuh

Aug 31, 2019

The benign explanation is crash reporting (though this seems like far more data than needed). Since every Android OEM builds their own system libs, if you want actionable stack traces you need a mechanism to synthesize symbols for every system lib from every OEM release you see.

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An interesting question is then: Are they reading *all* of them, or just the subset they use? In the latter case, I'd be much less upset.

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Does it make much of a difference? They're part of a verified system image compiled for the device. Checking a single library, including mapped inside the process is probably enough to identify it. The device variant and patch level are something that's known and can't be hidden.

8:17 PM · Aug 31, 2019Twitter Web App