A federal court in California has released new documents accusing Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg of monitoring Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon users without their consent. The documents, reported by a leading news portal, reveal that in 2016 Facebook launched a secret project called “Ghostbusters” to intercept and decrypt network traffic between Snapchat users and Snapchat’s servers.
The goal of Project Ghostbusters was to gain insights into user behaviour on Snapchat in order to gain a competitive advantage, according to the court filings. The documents include internal Facebook emails in which Zuckerberg stresses the need to obtain analytics on Snapchat despite its encrypted traffic.
In a June 2016 email, Zuckerberg wrote that whenever someone asks about Snapchat, the answer is usually that Facebook lacks analytics because Snapchat’s traffic is encrypted. He went on to say that given Snapchat’s rapid growth, it seems important to find a new way to reliably analyze their traffic, perhaps by conducting focus groups or writing custom software.
Whoa. Facebook had a secret “Project Ghostbusters” (get it?) which allegedly was to decrypt “man-in-the-middle” style Snapchat traffic to copy it. Yellow highlight indicates redactions just lifted in nine unsealed plaintiffs briefs in private antitrust lawsuit. Wild stuff. /1 pic.twitter.com/lTLM38So1M
— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) March 26, 2024
Facebook engineers then proposed using Onavo, a VPN service acquired by Facebook in 2013, to intercept traffic from specific Snapchat subdomains. A month later, they presented software kits for iOS and Android that could intercept traffic for certain subdomains, enabling analysis of in-app usage by decrypting what would normally be encrypted traffic.
The project was later expanded beyond Snapchat to include Amazon and YouTube as well. According to the court filings, Project Ghostbusters involved a team of senior executives and approximately 41 lawyers. Emails show engineers reporting they could now measure detailed in-app activity by parsing Snapchat analytics collected from Onavo users.
However, some Facebook employees expressed concerns about Project Ghostbusters. Jay Parikh, Facebook’s head of infrastructure engineering at the time, and Pedro Canahuati, then head of security engineering, wrote emails questioning the ethics and legality of the project. Canahuati wrote that no security person would ever feel comfortable with this type of monitoring, regardless of user consent, because the general public doesn’t understand how it works.
Facebook shut down Onavo in 2019 after an investigation revealed Facebook had been secretly paying teenagers to use Onavo so the company could access all of their web activity.
