Facebook snooped on users' Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal
A secret program called "Project Ghostbusters" saw Facebook devise a way to intercept and decrypt the encrypted network traffic of Snapchat users to study their behavior.
What the title and bot don't mention: They did so by installing spyware on phones of users of a vpn they acquired:
After Zuckerberg’s email, the Onavo team took on the project and a month later proposed a solution: so-called kits that can be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific subdomains, “allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage,” read an email from July 2016. “This is a ‘man-in-the-middle’ approach.”
What's more:
Later, according to the court documents, Facebook expanded the program to Amazon and YouTube.
Obligatory this is why you shouldn't use a free/cheap vpn.
How the fuck is no one in jail over this?
Because money
My guess is they put it in the terms and conditions of the vpn.
People don't mind that mainstream society is built by abusing them. It's not for us, it's for them. This isn't freedom?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers.
On Tuesday, a federal court in California released new documents discovered as part of the class action lawsuit between consumers and Meta, Facebook’s parent company.
“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an email dated June 9, 2016, which was published as part of the lawsuit.
When the network traffic is unencrypted, this type of attack allows the hackers to read the data inside, such as usernames, passwords, and other in-app activity.
This is why Facebook engineers proposed using Onavo, which when activated had the advantage of reading all of the device’s network traffic before it got encrypted and sent over the internet.
“We now have the capability to measure detailed in-app activity” from “parsing snapchat [sic] analytics collected from incentivized participants in Onavo’s research program,” read another email.
The original article contains 671 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
How does that work?
Snapchat uses TLS - right?! Did Onavo install a CA? Can every VPN-App do so? Did Snapchat not use certificate pinning?