Meta confirms it is blocking EU-based users from accessing Threads via VPN

bleistift2 , 11 months ago

https://feddit.de/pictrs/image/ae0fab48-64ed-4494-aa0a-4101e20046c5.jpeg

GunnarRunnar , 11 months ago

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.

axum , 11 months ago

Facebook isn't interested in complying to EU's privacy laws at this point, so they're blocking it off entirely

Anomandaris , 11 months ago

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?

fartsinger , 11 months ago

I imagine they just have a blocklist of IP ranges owned by major VPN providers.

SamsonSeinfelder , 11 months ago

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.