Ask HN: So what happened to Facebook "localhost" tracking?

The big mood on Hacker News is basically: did Facebook quietly back off after getting caught? The original post asks whatever happened to the controversial "localhost" tracking story from last year — the claim that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was using hidden browser tricks to connect people’s web activity to their identities. And the crowd’s answer is a very online mix of relief, suspicion, and rage.

One commenter points to research updates saying Meta’s tracking code appears to have stopped sending requests to a user’s own device. Another says web browsers like Chrome and Firefox are rolling out protections that warn people when apps try this kind of move. In plain English: the door may finally be closing on a tracking method that made users feel like tech companies were snooping a little too close to home.

But the comments don’t stop at “problem solved.” Oh no — this is where the drama kicks in. One user drops the legal bombshell that a judge has allowed a lawsuit against Meta to move forward, instantly turning the thread from “whatever happened?” into “maybe they stopped because lawyers showed up.” Another commenter goes full labor-politics mode, dreaming of a software engineer union so coders could refuse to build creepy features without risking their jobs. And then there’s the dark-comedy wildcard: someone casually wonders how hard it would be to poison the data and wreck the whole system. So yes, the apparent tracking shutdown is the headline — but the real show is the comment section yelling, “Good, and don’t try it again.”