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Project Ghostbusters: Meta's covert surveillance of Snapchat user data to devise competitive tactics
Meta has been secretly monitoring its users' Snapchat information by intercepting and decoding the network traffic between users' devices and Snapchat's servers. This secretive operation, named "Project Ghostbusters," was primarily aimed at understanding how users interact with Snapchat and then developing a rival service.
Recently disclosed legal papers from a federal lawsuit involving customers and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, reveal a covert operation started by Facebook in 2016. The operation's goal was to intercept and decode the network communication between Snapchat users and its servers.
Termed as "Project Ghostbusters," the initiative was designed to understand user habits and enhance Facebook's competitive position over Snapchat.
Legal papers disclosed by a California-based federal court provide a glimpse into Meta's strategies to outperform competitors such as Snapchat, and subsequent rivals including Amazon and YouTube.
Facebook had to create unique technology to overcome the encryption methods used by these platforms.
A single document details Project Ghostbusters as a piece of Facebook's In-App Action Panel (IAPP) initiative, utilizing methods to intercept and decode encrypted data from Snapchat, and subsequently from YouTube and Amazon users.
Emails from within Facebook's executive team, including from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, highlight the company's resolve to gather data on Snapchat, even with its secure, encrypted traffic.
Facebook's engineers suggested using Onavo, a service similar to a VPN that Facebook purchased in 2013, to carry out the project. However, Onavo was closed in 2019 after it was discovered that it had been collecting data from teenagers.
The suggested resolution entailed installing kits on iOS and Android gadgets, monitoring traffic for certain subdomains to gauge in-app activity – a strategy often called a "man-in-the-middle" technique.
This method enabled Facebook to tap into unencrypted network data prior to its encryption, making it possible to closely monitor activities within the app.
Nonetheless, disagreements were voiced within Facebook, particularly by Jay Parikh, who was the chief of infrastructure engineering at the time, and Pedro Canahuati, who was the chief of security engineering. They raised questions about the ethical and security consequences of Project Ghostbusters.
Canahuati emphasized unease over the absence of approval from the general population and the moral challenges presented by such methods of gathering data.
In 2020, Sarah Grabert and Maximilian Klein lodged a collective legal complaint against Facebook. They claimed that the firm had misled its users regarding its data gathering operations, used the collected data to pinpoint competitors, and inappropriately competed with new businesses. These disclosures intensify examination towards Facebook's data handling methods and provoke debates about the moral limits of data gathering and competition in the technology sector.
(Incorporating information from various sources)
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