Between 2016 and 2019, Facebook tracked the behavior of users on Snapchat, Amazon, and YouTube in an effort to gain an edge over key competitors. This is revealed by declassified court documents released on Tuesday by a federal court in California as part of an antitrust lawsuit against Meta, the company’s parent entity.
According to those internal reports, the social media giant launched a covert program designed to intercept and decipher the traffic between users of those platforms and their servers. This approach allowed Meta to observe how people interacted across different services.
The so-called Ghostbusters Project, named after Snapchat’s ghostly logo, developed a specialized technology to break the encryption that those apps rely on to protect their communications.
“Whenever someone asks about Snapchat, the typical answer is that because the traffic is encrypted we have no analytics on them,” wrote Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in an email the justice department could access. “Given the rapid growth, it seems important to find a new way to obtain reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to build panels or write custom software. We must figure out how to do it.”
Tactics at the edge of legality
Facebook resorted to an intermediary attack, a method often used by cybercriminals to intercept messages between two devices without permission. That technique makes it possible to analyze data flows and extract sensitive information without the victims realizing it.
The company leveraged Onavo, a service similar to a VPN that it acquired in 2013 and installed on iOS and Android devices, the operating systems used by iPhones and most mobile phones worldwide. This setup allowed it to “read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic” and “measure detailed activity inside the app,” scholars noted in two other internal messages.
Initially, Facebook used that approach to better understand the behavior of Snapchat users, a network particularly popular in the United States, its core market. Subsequently, the method was reportedly extended to target Amazon and YouTube, according to the court documents.
In 2019, Facebook shut down Onavo after TechCrunch published findings showing the company had paid users aged 13 to 35 to sell their privacy. The young participants who joined the secret program simply installed an app that tracked all their internet activity and their phone logs.