Newly unsealed court documents from an ongoing class action lawsuit against Meta show that in 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally directed executives to “figure out” how to track encrypted usage on competing apps like Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon.
TechCrunch reports that in a June 2016 email, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed frustration with the lack of analytics on Snapchat, writing, “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.”
Javier Olivan, then Facebook’s head of growth, responded that he had been “looking into this with the Onavo team,” referring to the VPN app Facebook acquired in 2013. Olivan tasked Guy Rosen, Onavo’s founder, to come up with “out of the box thinking” to address Zuckerberg’s request.
Mark Zuckerberg Meta Selfie (Facebook)
By July 2016, the Onavo team had developed software that could intercept and decrypt traffic from specific domains on iOS and Android devices. An internal email described the approach as a “‘man-in-the-middle’ approach” that allowed Facebook to “read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage.”
The covert data collection, dubbed “Project Ghostbusters” in reference to Snapchat’s ghost logo, continued for at least three years, expanding to include YouTube and Amazon. However, not all Facebook executives were comfortable with the project.
“I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay,” wrote Pedro Canahuati, Facebook’s then-head of security engineering, in an internal email. “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.”
Despite these concerns, Project Ghostbusters proceeded under Zuckerberg’s directive to gain a competitive advantage over rival apps. The unsealed documents also reveal that Facebook used third parties to recruit users to install the software, with no visible Onavo branding unless users took extra steps to analyze the tool.
The revelations from the court documents have raised serious questions about Facebook’s data collection practices and respect for user privacy. The ongoing class action lawsuit, filed by advertisers, alleges that Facebook’s actions allowed the company to unfairly inflate its ad rates and maintain a monopoly in the social media ads market.
Read more at TechCrunch here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
