After multiple EU-based users complained about not being able to access Threads app through VPN, Meta confirmed it is blocking such efforts.
It would be interesting to see exactly how Meta is managing to block VPN users. Is it simply a matter of looking up instagram or facebook account related to email addresses used to sign up? Is it evaluating some sort of browser fingerprint? That’s assuming VPN users are doing so via desktop, if it’s an Android device for example is the OS itself providing information that’s not getting obfuscated by the VPN?
I think Meta has very complex fingerprint service in their backend after all these years. They know what you are doing even when you are not using their service. Their tracking in bundled up in long chains of tracking services over many websites. As long as you use a non vanilla browser to access their service, they might have you in their database from a previous tracker that trapped you on one of the many websites that are selling/trading tracking fingerprints. Since a decade it is not about the IP anymore. You can data-triangulate personas and pinpoint them to an existing user-profile with a very high accuracy. It should be possible to visit the threads service with a VPN and a heavy neutered browser. But then again, if your request is to suspicious in its request (thinking tor-browser, command-line browser, etc.) they might put you as well on a detour for a captcha/recognizer that will look harmless in the fronted (“click all the cars!”) but its actual task is processing/scraping a fingerprint from your display-device (browser) that then again can be connected with this suspicious request for the future. I am sure that their VPN block is not 100% blocking Europeans, but will block most of the unsophisticated request from normal users that will just give up after some tries.
Here are some vectors for identifying users (via browserleaks): IP, JavaScript, WebRTC, Canvas, WebGL, Installed Fonts, Geolocation, Feature Detection, SSL certs, content filter.
Edit: I might get some downvotes for this, but iOS has some good protections build into their OS layer (so they say) to make it harder for advertisers to track you. See also this very well done 1 Minute ad showcasing how the modern internet ad industry works.
Not that I’d ever want to touch Threads with a ten-foot pole, but what options would there be to circumvent that sort of intrusion?
Browser containers. Not sure if chrome does it, but Firefox has separate containers that are sandboxed from one another. Make a “Meta” container and only access it from there.
Not really. You have to use browsers that are feature-poor (then again, that makes you ironically again very identifiable). You could use command line browsers that do not leak agents or fonts or stuff like that. Again: Makes you more sus to the ad networks. The best thing - as far as I read about it - is to be a chameleon. Have garbage data that is plausible but vague enough to always stay in a big group of possible profiles. Looks as much as possible like the biggest group of people so you can blend in with the mass, while not raise suspicious behavior. And that continue sly with every request you make to every mainstream website you make. You can see how this is hard enough already. I think there are people out there that might can give you a better answer than me. I try to block as much as possible wherever I go via uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole. But this is only a thin veil. In the end, they have me in their database already since years. But as long as I do not see the actual ad, I hope that I get ranked very low in the bidding process as they must know that I do not see/click those. The average instagram user without a adblocker is much more interesting for them.
Sounds interesting. Do you have a source, or further reading for any of this?
Probably by just looking at the IP address, either due to the IP addresses of the VPNs being public or by the fact that many users are accessing the service through a single IP address
I imagine they just have a blocklist of IP ranges owned by major VPN providers.
Are they afraid of legality and doing something so fishy that there’s no way it would fly in EU?
Or is it just that this day and age it’s expected that VPNs are blocked? Like with Netflix etc.
Facebook isn’t interested in complying to EU’s privacy laws at this point, so they’re blocking it off entirely
