"Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal", 26 March 2024

In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents. Facebook called this “Project Ghostbusters,” in a clear reference to Snapchat’s ghost-like logo.

... a federal court in California released new documents discovered as part of the class action lawsuit between consumers and Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

The newly released documents reveal how Meta tried to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors, including Snapchat and later Amazon and YouTube, by analyzing the network traffic of how its users were interacting with Meta’s competitors. Given these apps’ use of encryption, Facebook needed to develop special technology to get around it.

One of the documents details Facebook’s Project Ghostbusters. The project was part of the company’s In-App Action Panel (IAPP) program, which used a technique for “intercepting and decrypting” encrypted app traffic from users of Snapchat, and later from users of YouTube and Amazon, the consumers’ lawyers wrote in the document.

...
Inside Facebook, there wasn’t a consensus on whether Project Ghostbusters was a good idea. Some employees, including Jay Parikh, Facebook’s then-head of infrastructure engineering, and Pedro Canahuati, the then-head of security engineering, expressed their concern.

“I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay. No security person is ever comfortable with this, no matter what consent we get from the general public. The general public just doesn’t know how this stuff works,” Canahuati wrote in an email, included in the court documents.

In 2020, Sarah Grabert and Maximilian Klein filed a class action lawsuit against Facebook, claiming that the company lied about its data collection activities and exploited the data it “deceptively extracted” from users to identify competitors and then unfairly fight against these new companies.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment.

Google, Meta, and Snap did not respond to requests for comment.