Facebook Was Snooping On Rival Snapchat, YouTube And Amazon’s Users, Show Court Documents

Newly unsealed documents from a federal court in California have revealed that Meta-owned Facebook was monitoring users of social media rivals Snapchat, Google-owned YouTube and Amazon. Dubbed “Project Ghostbusters”, the initiative involved the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company intercepting and decrypting network traffic of Snapchat users, the media has reported.

In 2016, Facebook initiated a covert project aimed at intercepting and decrypting network traffic between users of Snapchat’s app and its servers. The objective was to gain insights into user behavior and bolster Facebook’s competitiveness against Snapchat, as revealed in recently unsealed court documents. Dubbed “Project Ghostbusters” by Zuckerberg-owned scial networking giant, the name clearly alludes to Snapchat’s ghost-like logo.

Part of a class action lawsuit between consumers and Meta, the disclosed documents reveal how the company scrutinised network traffic of users engaging with its competitors. In order to circumvent previous encryption methods utilised by platforms such as Snapchat, Facebook devised a specialised technology to monitor user activity on other platforms.

According to a report in TechCrunch, in an internal email dated June 9, 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed, “Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the response is typically that due to their encrypted traffic, we lack analytics about them. Considering their rapid growth, it appears crucial to devise a new method to obtain reliable analytics. Perhaps we should consider panels or develop custom software. Please explore how we can accomplish this.”

Following Zuckerberg’s email, developers at the company proposed leveraging Onavo, which is a VPN-like service acquired by Facebook back in 2013. A month later, the Onavo team devised a solution involving the installation of ‘kits’ on both Android and iOS devices.

In a separate email, Facebook stated that the technique, essentially a man-in-the-middle attack, enabled “us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage.” According to court documents, Facebook subsequently extended the programme to monitor activity on YouTube and Amazon.

“We now have the capability to measure detailed in-app activity” from “parsing snapchat [sic] analytics collected from incentivized participants in Onavo’s research program,” read another email, as per the TechCrunch report.