Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that META spied on Snapchat users using a new secret project called Project Ghostbusters.
“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them,” said Mark Zuckerberg in an email to three Facebook executives in 2016, unsealed in Meta’s antitrust case on Saturday. “It seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them… You should figure out how to do this.”
Meta has lots of data through Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, but that’s not enough for them. Court filings unsealed last week allege Meta created an internal effort to spy on Snapchat in a secret initiative called “Project Ghostbusters.” Meta did so through Onavo, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service the company offered between 2016 and 2019 that, ultimately, wasn’t private at all.
Meta’s Onavo unit is not new to controversies. The team has a history of using various techniques to collect user data. After acquiring Onavo from an Israeli firm, Meta had used the service to spy on its competitors via the millions of people who were using the app.
After Zuckerberg sent the email, developers at the company suggested using Onavo, a VPN-like service that Facebook had acquired in 2013. A month later, the team working on Onavo came up with a solution that involved installing ‘kits’ on both Android and iOS devices.