Posted by A federal court in California claims to have unearthed evidence suggesting that Meta Platforms engaged in clandestine monitoring of users on platforms such as Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon. The court documents unveil Facebook’s covert initiative called ‘Project Ghostbusters,’ allegedly initiated in 2016, to intercept and decode network traffic between Snapchat users and its servers, reported TechCrunch.
According to the report, Facebook’s ‘Project Ghostbusters’ wanted to gain a competitive edge over Snapchat by analysing user behaviour. Internal conversations among Facebook executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, indicated plans to obtain access to Snapchat’s encrypted data for analytical purposes. He allegedly highlighted the importance of acquiring insights into Snapchat’s growing user community and suggested the exploration of alternative data-gathering approaches.
In an internal email dated June 9, 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly said, ‘Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them. 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.”
Court documents from the class action lawsuit reveal how the company was examining network traffic of users engaging with its rivals. It devises a unique technology to bypass previous encryption methods employed by platforms such as Snapchat in order to observe user activities on other platforms.
Facebook’s Project Ghostbuster
Facebook engineers reportedly proposed using Onavo, a VPN service the company acquired in 2013, to intercept and analyse traffic from specific subdomains to gather competitive intelligence against Snapchat. As per the court documents, the project was later expanded to monitor traffic from Amazon and YouTube as well. The project reportedly involved senior executives and legal teams. However, internal dissent emerged, with concerns raised by employees like Jay Parikh and Pedro Canahuati about the ethical implications of intercepting encrypted traffic.
This highlights Facebook’s ongoing ethical dilemmas regarding user privacy. The controversy adds to Facebook’s history of privacy issues, including the discontinuation of Onavo in 2019 due to covert data collection practices. These revelations amplify concerns about Facebook’s commitment to user privacy and ethical data handling, prompting calls for more transparency and accountability in tech companies’ data practices.