Documents from a federal court in California unveiled that Meta launched a secret project called Facebook's Project Ghostbusters which was used to analyze the network traffic of its users on Snapchat, Amazon, and YouTube.
The documents were released as part of the ongoing class action lawsuit between Facebook's parent company, Meta.
(Photo : Justin Sullivan / Staff)
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Facebook's Project Ghostbusters
According to the documents, Facebook's secret project was launched in 2016. The project was created to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between Snapchat users and its servers which would help Facebook compete with the platform.
"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," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an email dated June 2016.
The Facebook engineers figured that the solution was to use Onavo, a VPN-like company that was acquired in 2013. However, the company had to shut it down after an investigation revealed that it secretly paid teenagers to use Onavo so that the company could access their web activity.
Facebook Expand Project Ghostbusters to Amazon, YouTube
The use of Onavo allowed Facebook to get the advantage of reading all of the device's network traffic before it gets encrypted and sent on the internet. After targeting Snapchat, the company expanded the project to Amazon and YouTube users.
Among the court documents, some employees were shown to have voiced their concerns about the project. One of them was Pedro Canahuati, the head of security engineer at the time of the project.
"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.
Amazon declined to comment while Google, Meta, and Snap did not respond.
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