Ever heard of Snapchat? Well, Facebook sure has, and it seems they’ve been up to some sneaky stuff according to newly revealed court documents.
Back in 2016, Facebook’s big boss Mark Zuckerberg got a bit miffed with Snapchat’s privacy measures. He wanted to know what users were up to on the app, but because Snapchat’s traffic was encrypted, Facebook couldn’t snoop around as easily as they wanted to.
In an email, Zuckerberg said, “Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them.” Translation: Facebook couldn’t spy on Snapchat users because their messages were locked up tight.
So, Zuckerberg decided to launch ‘Project Ghostbusters’ to figure out what Snapchat users were doing. He wanted “reliable analytics” about them.
Facebook had a tool called Onavo Virtual Private Network (VPN) that they got from another company. This tool let them peek into what people were doing on other social media apps by decoding the messages sent between the apps and their servers.
After Zuckerberg’s email, the engineers at Onavo came up with a sneaky way to read Snapchat’s messages. They called it ‘man-in-the-middle’ monitoring. This meant they could see what was going on, even though the messages were supposed to be secret.
This spying trick wasn’t just for Snapchat, though. Facebook also used it on Amazon and YouTube.
Now, why should we care? Well, these court documents came from a lawsuit where consumers accused Facebook’s parent company Meta of being unfair. They said Facebook’s spying hurt competition, especially for Snapchat.
So, it seems like Facebook might have been playing dirty to stay on top. Sneaky, right?
