Facebook spied on Snapchat users’ traffic in secret project, court documents reveal

Facebook attempted to gain a competitive advantage over Snapchat by accessing the traffic of users who used this application, in a secret project called ‘Ghostbusters’, according to new court documents.

The current Meta used its own virtual private network (VPN) service Onavo in 2016 – acquired three years earlier – to access the encrypted information and traffic of users on its servers about the searches they did on Snapchat.

This information is not entirely new, since The Wall Street Journal revealed in 2017 that Facebook used the VPN to carry out market analysis, something that the technology company defended then and even pointed out that it was already noted in Onavo’s policies.

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The application closed in 2019, and a year later Sarah Grabert and Maximilian Klein filed a collective complaint against Facebook, understanding that with this practice it had exploited user data through deceptive practices and engaged in anti-competitive behavior.

As part of the trial being held in the Federal Court of California (United States), the judge has made public new documents, which reveal that Meta/Facebook tried to obtain a competitive advantage from rivals by analyzing the traffic of the users when they interacted with these other applications, as reported in TechCrunch.

To access and analyze this traffic, which was encrypted, the company resorted to what it called ‘Ghostbusters Project’, in reference to the Snapchat logo (a white ghost on a yellow background), as reflected in the internal emails revealed in said documents. . Basically it was using Onavo to spy on the users of this VPN with a technique known as ‘man in the middle’.

According to the document, this project was implemented between 2016 and 2019, first to obtain information about Snapchat but later also about YouTube and Amazon.

Source: Elcomercio

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