Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has found itself in the middle of a controversy once again. Leaked documents have exposed a secret project that was aimed at spying on Snapchat user traffic. This isn’t the first time that such news has come forward about Meta, so this is not surprising at all. Read along to know the entire story.
In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project, which was called “Project Ghostbusters.” The name was an ode to the ghost logo that Snapchat has, according to leaked documents. The purpose of this project was to intercept and decode the communications between Snapchat’s servers and users. Why did they plan on doing this? This was done to get insights into user behaviour to gain a competitive advantage over the blooming platform.
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CEO Mark Zuckerberg was fully involved in this project, and email exchanges between Zuckerberg and Facebook executives have revealed this. These emails also shed light on the motives and methods behind this secret project. In one such mail, Zuckerberg said, “Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them.”
Various methods were explored by Facebook engineers to spy on Snapchat. They finally used Onavo, a VPN app that was acquired by Facebook. This allowed Meta to collect traffic data from both iOS and Android devices, effectively implementing a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack. They could even chart out detailed insights into in-app activity and user behaviour.
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As I mentioned in the beginning, this isn’t the first time that Meta has come under scrutiny for invading privacy. The Cambridge Analytica debacle is one such example. The concerns with Meta and privacy just keep growing by the day.
