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Project Ghostbusters: Meta's surveillance of user Snapchat activities to devise rival tactics
Meta has been monitoring user interactions on Snapchat by intercepting and decoding the network traffic between user devices and Snapchat servers. This initiative, dubbed "Project Ghostbusters," aimed to understand user behavior on Snapchat and consequently develop a rival platform.
Newly disclosed legal papers from a national lawsuit involving customers and Meta, the company that owns Facebook, reveal a hidden initiative started by Facebook in 2016. This initiative was designed to intercept and decode the network data exchanged between Snapchat users and its servers.
Named "Project Ghostbusters," the initiative was designed to understand user behavior and enhance Facebook's competitive position against Snapchat.
Legal papers, disclosed by a federal court in California, provide a glimpse into Meta's strategies to outperform competitors such as Snapchat, and subsequent rivals like Amazon and YouTube.
Facebook had to create specific technology to overcome the encryption methods used by these platforms.
A document describes Project Ghostbusters as a component of Facebook's In-App Action Panel (IAPP) scheme, using methods to capture and decipher encrypted app data from Snapchat, eventually extending to YouTube and Amazon users.
Emails from within Facebook's leadership, including those from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, highlight the firm's resolve to gather data analysis on Snapchat, regardless of its secure data transfer.
Facebook's engineers suggested using Onavo, a service similar to a VPN that Facebook bought in 2013, to carry out the project. However, Onavo was discontinued in 2019 after it was revealed that it had been collecting data from teenagers.
The suggested resolution involved installing kits on iOS and Android gadgets, capturing data for particular subdomains to assess the usage within the application – a technique often known as a "man-in-the-middle" strategy.
This method enabled Facebook to tap into unsecured network traffic prior to its encryption, thus easing the process of measuring detailed activity within the app.
Nonetheless, there were opposing opinions within Facebook, notably from Jay Parikh, the former head of infrastructure engineering, and Pedro Canahuati, the former head of security engineering, who raised concerns about the ethical and security risks associated with Project Ghostbusters.
Canahuati underscored the unease concerning the absence of approval from the wider population and the ethical quandaries brought about by such information gathering methods.
In 2020, Sarah Grabert and Maximilian Klein lodged a collective legal action against Facebook. They claimed that the social media giant had misled its users regarding its data gathering processes, used the collected data to pinpoint competition, and unjustly rivalled upcoming firms. These disclosures lead to increased examination of Facebook's data handling methods and spark debates about the moral limits of data gathering and rivalry in the technology sector.
(Incorporating information from various sources)
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