Facebook secretly tracked Snapchat, Amazon and YouTube users

2024-03-27 12:03:03

Between 2016 and 2019, Facebook tracked the behavior of Snapchat, Amazon and YouTube users to try to gain a competitive advantage on main rivals. This is clear from court documents declassified on Tuesday by a federal court in California, which is investigating a class action lawsuit antitrust against Meta, its parent company.

According to those internal reports, the social media giant launched a secret program designed to intercept and decrypt network traffic between the people who used those platforms and their servers, which allowed him to know their interactions.

The so-called ‘Ghostbusters Project’, in reference to Snapchat’s ghostly logo, developed special technology to break the encryption that these applications use to protect their communications.

“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we don’t have analytics on them,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an email to which the court has had access. . “Given how fast they are growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics on them. We may have to make dashboards or write custom software. “You have to figure out how to do it.”

Cybercriminal technique

Facebook resorted to a man-in-the-middle attack, a technique used by cybercriminals to intercept messages between two devices without permission. This method allows the data flow to be analyzed and confidential information stolen without victims being able to detect it.

The company used Onavo, a VPN-like service it bought in 2013 and installed on iOS and Android, the operating systems used by iPhones and most other mobile phones in the world. That allowed him to “read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic” and “have the ability to measure detailed activity within the app“, they confessed in two other internal messages.

Initially, Facebook used this attack to better understand the behavior of users of Snapchat, a social network that is particularly popular in the United States, its main market. However, later was used against Amazon and YouTubeaccording to judicial revelations.

In 2019, Facebook closed Onavo after an investigation by the specialized media ‘TechCrunch’ revealed that it had been paying users between 13 and 35 years old to sell their privacy. The young people who accessed that secret program They just had to install an app on their devices that tracked all their internet activity and phone records.