Facebook Spied on Snapchat Users With Its Secret Project: Documents Reveal
Meta has come under fire for its privacy practices yet again. A recent set of leaked documents revealed a secretive project where Facebook’s app allegedly spied on Snapchat user traffic. Here’s everything you need to know.
In 2016, Facebook initiated a secret project called “Project Ghostbusters”. This project aimed tointercept and decodethe communication flowing between Snapchat’s servers and users “to understand users’ behavior”. This was presumably done to gain a competitive edge against the rising popularity of Snapchat. According to the documents, “Project Ghostbusters” was a play on Snapchat’s ghost logo, hinting at its secretive nature.Image Courtesy: Shutterstock
The Federal court in Californiareleased the documentson Tuesday as a part of the lawsuit between users and Meta. They also revealed that the firmtried to do the same with Amazon and YouTube.
Facebook’s secret project was a part of the company’s IAPP program (In-App Action Panel). This was created to gain a competitive edge over its competitors by intercepting and decrypting their traffic.
How Facebook Spied on Snapchat Users
The documents also contained emails discussing the project which were published as a part of the lawsuit. Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Executive of Facebook wrote in an email, “Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them”.
He also wrote, “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”.
A few Facebook engineers came up with the idea of using Onavo via “kits”. These kits can beinstalled on iOS and Android to get traffic, effectively making this an MITM (Man-in-the-middle) attack.
Once the project succeeded, an email read, “We now have the capability tomeasure detailed in-app activity” from “parsing Snapchat [sic] analytics collected from incentivized participants in Onavo’s research program”.
The details are quite baffling but it’s not the first time Facebook has done something like this. Take theCambridge Analytica Scandalfor example, which harvested the data of up to 87 million users to assist in America’s 2016 presidential elections.
What are your thoughts about Facebook’s spying practices? Do you still use Facebook or other Meta products? Let us know in the comments section below.
Abubakar Mohammed
Abubakar covers Tech on Beebom. Hailing from a Computer Science background, the start of his love for Tech dates back to 2011, when he was gifted a Dell Inspiron 5100. When he’s not covering Tech, you’ll find him binge-watching anime and Tech content on YouTube, hunting heads in competitive FPS games, or exploring Teyvat in Genshin Impact. He has previously worked for leading publications such as Fossbytes, How-To Geek, and Android Police.
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