Facebook secretly spies on users’ Snapchat and YouTube data for secret project, new documents reveal

Meta Platforms, led by Mark Zuckerberg, faces new allegations of spying on users of Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon, according to documents released by a federal court in California. The documents reveal that Facebook initiated a secret project called ‘Project Ghostbusters’ in 2016 to intercept and decrypt network traffic between Snapchat users and servers.

The aim of the project was to understand user behavior and gain a competitive edge over Snapchat. Internal Facebook emails discussing the project were also included in the documents. In one email from June 9, 2016, Zuckerberg highlighted the need to obtain analytics on Snapchat despite its encrypted traffic, stating, ”Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them. Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.”

Facebook engineers proposed using Onavo, a service similar to a Virtual Private Network acquired by Facebook in 2013, to intercept specific subdomains’ traffic. They presented proposal kits a month later that could be installed on iOS and Android platforms to intercept traffic for particular subdomains, enabling the team to analyze in-app usage by reading what would typically be encrypted traffic.

Project Ghostbusters was later expanded to include Amazon and YouTube. A team of senior executives and roughly 41 lawyers worked on the project, according to court filings. Some Facebook employees, including Jay Parikh, Facebook’s then-head of infrastructure engineering, and Pedro Canahuati, the then-head of security engineering, expressed concerns about the project.

”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,” Mr. Canahuati wrote in an email included in the court documents.

Facebook shut down Onavo in 2019 after an investigation revealed that the company had been secretly paying teenagers to use Onavo so Facebook could access all of their web activity.