An ongoing lawsuit between Meta and users has brought to light several confidential internal documents from the American social network. We learn in particular that Facebook launched a secret project in 2016, consisting of spying on the network traffic of Snapchat users.
By arriving on the social media market in 2011, Snapchat quickly established itself as the fashionable trend among young people. The application founded in particular by Evan Spiegel has been a huge success. In just a few years, Snapchat has become a target for Facebook, which was still the undisputed market leader.
In a vain attempt to reproduce the masterstroke, Facebook has not hesitated in recent years to imitate, not to say copy, exclusive features of Snapchat. In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg’s RS, for example, launched Avatars, a true reproduction of Snapchat’s Bitmojis. Facebook Messenger has also started using ephemeral messagesor the brand name of the little ghost app.
Ghostbuster, Facebook’s anti-Snapchat project
However, a recent lawsuit between users and Meta allows us to learn more about the efforts put in place by Facebook to compete with this competitor. During this legal standoff, several confidential documents from the American social network have been revealed. We learn in particular that Facebook launched a top secret project in 2016 which consisted of intercept and decrypt network traffic between Snapchat users and the app’s servers.
The idea being to be able analyze user behavior and habits. In other words, understand what makes Snapchat successful. This project, called Ghostbuster (in reference to the famous Snapchat logo), was based on technology specially designed by Facebook engineers to bypass the encryption mechanisms of Snapchat, but also of Amazon or YouTube.
“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we don’t have any analytics on it,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, in an email dated June 9, 2016 and published as part of the lawsuit. “Given how quickly they are growing, it seems important to find a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Maybe we need to create panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do that,” suggested the billionaire.
Also read: Snapchat denounces Facebook and Instagram’s tactics to crush competition
Onano, Free VPN and Spy Tool
To do this, Facebook engineers exploited Onavo, a free VPN service acquired by the company in 2013. Regularly accused of being a tool actually dedicated to data mining, Facebook finally closed Onavo after the publication in 2019 of a journalistic investigation proving that the social network had paid teenagers to use Onavo. This allowed Facebook to spy on the browsing of these young users.
As the documents reveal, Onavo teams developed kits at Zuckerberg’s request in 2016 that can be installed on Android and iOS for intercept traffic from specific subdomains, and allow them to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic. Within Facebook, several executives had expressed their disagreement with the Ghostbuster project. This was notably the case of Jay Parikh, former head of Facebook infrastructure engineering, and Pedro Canahuati, security engineer.
“I can’t think of a good argument for why this is acceptable. No security professional is comfortable with this, no matter how much consent we get from the general public. The general public simply doesn’t know how it works. denounced Mr. Canahuati in an email included in the court documents.
Source: TechCrunch