In 2016, Facebook began a secret project to listen in on and decrypt the network data going between Snapchat users and the company’s servers. Newly released court papers say the goal was to learn about how users behaved and help Facebook compete with Snapchat. Facebook named this “Project Ghostbusters,” which is a clear nod to Snapchat’s image, which looks like a ghost.
A federal court in California released new papers on Tuesday that were found as part of the class action lawsuit between Facebook users and Meta, the company that owns Facebook.
The recently made public papers show that Meta tried to get an edge over its rivals, first Snapchat and then Amazon and YouTube, by looking at the network traffic of how its users were interacting with those rivals. Because these apps use encryption, Facebook had to make its own technology to get around it.
One of the papers talks about Project Ghostbusters on Facebook. The project was part of the company’s In-App Action Panel (IAPP) programme. The lawyers for the consumers wrote in the document that the programme “intercepted and decrypted” encrypted app data from Snapchat users and then from YouTube and Amazon users.
The document has private Facebook messages that talk about the project.
In a June 9, 2016, email made public as part of the case, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said, “Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them.” As they grow quickly, it seems important to find a new way to get accurate information about them. We might need to make panels or write our own tools. “You need to figure this out.”
Engineers at Facebook used Onavo, a service like a VPN that Facebook bought in 2013, to fix the problem. A TechCrunch investigation in 2019 showed that Facebook had been paying teens to use Onavo so the company could see everything they did on the web. As a result, Facebook shut down Onavo.
After Zuckerberg’s email, the Onavo team took over the project and, a month later, came up with a solution: “kits” that can be installed on iOS and Android and intercept traffic for certain subdomains. This, according to an email from July 2016, “lets us read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage.” “This method is called “man-in-the-middle.
Hackers take over internet data going from one device to another over a network. This type of attack is also known as adversary-in-the-middle these days. If the network information isn’t encrypted, this kind of attack lets hackers read the data inside, like usernames, passwords, and other things that happen inside apps.
This method of network analysis would not work because Snapchat encrypted the data between the app and its servers. This is why Facebook engineers suggested using Onavo. When it was turned on, it could read all of the device’s network data before it was encrypted and sent over the internet.
“We can now measure detailed in-app activity” by “parsing Snapchat analytics collected from participants in Onavo’s research programme who were paid to take part,” said another email.
Later, the court papers say that Facebook added Amazon and YouTube to the programme.
It wasn’t clear on Facebook whether Project Ghostbusters was a good idea or not. Some workers, like Pedro Canahuati, who was head of security engineering at the time, and Jay Parikh, who was head of infrastructure engineering at the time, were worried.
“I can’t think of a good reason for this to be okay.” No matter how much permission the public gives, no security guard is ever okay with this. “Most people don’t understand how this works,” Canahuati wrote in an email that was put in the court papers.
Sarah Grabert and Maximilian Klein sued Facebook as a group in 2020, saying that the company lied about the data it collected and used the information it “deceptively extracted” from users to find rivals and then fight unfairly against these new companies.
Also Read: New Eu Charges Have Been Brought Against Meta’s “consent or Pay” Data Grab
A representative for Amazon refused to comment.
Google, Meta, and Snap were asked to react but did not do so.
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