Task management by putting up ads on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites for their users to click on ads that are placed directly on their iPhones. This, one might put it, means that Facebook can’t even tell you what ads are being viewed by which people.

This kind of attack cannot happen

In the real world (we’ve seen this a lot in the past here). The only way to stop these companies from operating anonymously is to do something like the so-far unsuccessful attempt to kill off WhatsApp in 2008, of which Facebook has just released its latest version. That effort succeeded only because its customers actually believed that its privacy practices had been breached, and that it had made it the first social web application (with no encryption) to do so. (And yes, WhatsApp was originally created to run mobile apps, one must remember that mobile apps also have the capability to handle text messages.) The technology will also work against those who are using Facebook Messenger to record phone calls from their families.

Facebook

Facebook has already been shown to be violating a section of the U.S. Copyright Act when it uses WhatsApp to record personal phone calls and social media conversations, but those actions constitute an invasion of privacy. There’s a real possibility that WhatsApp’s operators will now be able to use their users’ data to track people that they may have known of over time.

What happens now

In any case, all the usual caveats and caveats about user tracking are also out there. The fact remains that this