Secret Facebook project spied on Snapchat user data, documents say
- The secret operation was reportedly codenamed 'Project Ghostbusters'
- Facebook also snooped on YouTube and Amazon, court documents say
- Meta argues users gave consent to provide data about usage on other apps
FILE – The Facebook logo is seen on a cell phone in Boston, USA, Oct. 14, 2022. Users of Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger platforms are experiencing login issues in what appears to be a widespread outage. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)
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(NewsNation) — In 2016, Facebook carried out a secret project to spy on Snapchat user data and later used the same snooping method on YouTube and Amazon to gain a competitive advantage, according to newly unsealed court documents.
The documents — which came from a class-action lawsuit between consumers and Facebook’s parent company, Meta — allege that the internal operation, codenamed “Project Ghostbusters,” came at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s request.
“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them,” Zuckerberg wrote in a June 2016 email to three of the company’s executives, according to the documents.
“Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this,” Zuckerberg’s email continued.
The solution engineers came up with involved the company’s virtual private network (VPN) service Onavo, which enabled Facebook to “intercept” and “decrypt” Snapchat’s protected analytics data, the documents say.
The Onavo team allegedly developed “kits” allowing them to read “what would otherwise be encrypted traffic” to measure their competitor’s in-app activity. According to the documents, Facebook later deployed the spying technique against YouTube from 2017 to 2018 and Amazon in 2018.
“The intended and actual result of this program was to harm competition, including Facebook’s then-nascent Social Advertising competitor Snapchat,” the plaintiffs argued in the filing.
A Meta spokesperson dismissed the claims in an email to NewsNation, writing, “There is nothing new here — this issue was reported on years ago. The plaintiffs’ claims are baseless and completely irrelevant to the case.”
In a filing unsealed Tuesday, Meta’s lawyers said users of the “Facebook Research App” consented to provide the company with data about their usage of other apps.
The company also argued that Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, “does not know whether any of Meta’s research provided Meta with a competitive advantage.”
Snap did not respond to NewsNation’s request for comment.
In 2019, Facebook shut down Onavo after a TechCrunch investigation found that Facebook had been paying teenagers to use the VPN to access their web activity.
The latest documents stem from a class-action lawsuit filed in 2020. The plaintiffs are a group of consumers accusing Facebook of exploiting user data to maintain its market power. The company has denied the claims.
