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.
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.
Facebook’s engineers solution was to use Onavo, a VPN-like service that Facebook acquired in 2013. In 2019, Facebook shut down Onavo after a TechCrunch investigation revealed that Facebook had been secretly paying teenagers to use Onavo so the company could access all of their web activity.
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.”
A man-in-the-middle attack — nowadays also called adversary-in-the-middle — is an attack where hackers intercept internet traffic flowing from one device to another over a network. 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.
I was thinking of buying a Meta Quest 3, because of a lack of similar devices. I wasn't really seriously considering it, but I sure as hell am not at all now.
I'm sure corporations like this would give you free Internet if they could collect and sell all your data. I'm also sure people would still do it, regardless of how much they are being monetized as a product.
Since companies like Facebook own legislators, our only real choice is to stop using it. Unpopular opinion, but If you really want fuck Zuck, delete your account, and get all your friends and family to as well. Maybe there's some alternatives for the people who truly use the service to connect with friends/family?
I must be way out of the loop, cuz I had no idea this was possible. So does this mean the Facebook app on my phone has permission to view all of my network traffic? Why do Android and iOS allow this? Shouldn't that be a special permission that can only be granted explicitly?
Certainly they weren’t planning on actually planning on finding a way to get people to install a VPN to decrypt their traffic just to use Facebook, right?
That’s why they paid teenagers to use the VPN so they could get some “guerrilla market research”.
Even in 2013 apps didn’t have the permission access to install a device level VPN without some unspecified exploit. 0 chance Facebook would literally hack people’s phones, right?
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.
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