Facebook utilized user data to learn about Snapchat traffic, court documents reveal

Recently unsealed court filings show Facebook allegedly took part in efforts to spy on Snapchat through user devices.

Dubbed “Project Ghostbusters,” Facebook’s alleged goal was to use the 2016 project to understand how people used Snapchat.

Engineers used Onavo, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service Facebook offered between 2016 and 2019, to collect the information.

The details are part of documents released under a class action lawsuit against Facebook. (Meta, Facebook’s parent company, came about in 2021).

One of the included documents has an internal email from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them,” he wrote in a June 2016 email to executives.”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.”

The project saw engineers create “kits” for installation on Android and iOS devices. The kits intercepted traffic, allowing the company to access information that would otherwise be encrypted.

“This is a ‘man-in-the-middle’ approach,” a July 2016 email states.

Facebook expanded Project Ghostbusters to include Amazon and YouTube before shutting Onavo down in 2019. The move took place after Apple booted it from the App Store over allegations it violated its data collection policies.

Source: TechCrunch, Gizmodo