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Documents reveal that Project Ghostbusters intercepted the network traffic to help Facebook compete with Snapchat.
Image credit: Frederic Legrand - COMEO/Shutterstock
Facebook is entangled in a new data collection case. Documents discovered by a federal court in California reveal that Mark Zuckerberg's company launched Project Ghostbusters (alluding to Snapchat's logo depicting a ghost) in 2016 meant to intercept and decrypt the network traffic of Snapchat users. By doing this, the company tried to understand users' behavior to help Facebook compete with Snapchat.
Project Ghostbusters, as reported by Tech Crunch, was part of the company’s In-App Action Panel (IAPP) program, "which used a technique for 'intercepting and decrypting' encrypted app traffic from users of Snapchat" and then YouTube and Amazon.
"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them," Zuckerberg said in one of the emails. "Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."
Image credit: Chinnapong/Shutterstock
So Facebook used Onavo, a VPN service it acquired in 2013. In 2019, the company shut it down after it was revealed that it had been paying teenagers to use Onavo so it could access their web activity.
The Onavo team came up with "kits" that intercept traffic, "allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage."
Thankfully, not everyone went insane inside Facebook, agreeing that was a great plan. Some employees, including Jay Parikh, the company's head of infrastructure engineering at that moment, and Pedro Canahuati, the then-head of security engineering, questioned the decision.
"I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay. No security person is ever comfortable with this, no matter what consent we get from the general public. The general public just doesn’t know how this stuff works," Canahuati wrote in an email.
This is far from the first time Meta and its services were accused of snooping. When Threads launched, many people were extremely concerned about its information collection agreement. Now, the European Commission is investigating Meta along with Apple and Google. It suspects Meta's "pay or consent" model doesn't provide "a real alternative in case users do not consent, thereby not achieving the objective of preventing the accumulation of personal data by gatekeepers."
Who knows what else we will find out in this class action lawsuit? Stay tuned, find the documents here, and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
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