Project Ghostbusters: how Facebook spied on Snapchat users

From 2016 to 2019, Facebook spied on users of Snapchat, but also YouTube and Amazon. Project code name: "Ghostbusters".

Court documents released as part of a lawsuit against Meta have shed light on Facebook's illegal surveillance practices. The documents, unveiled as part ofan ongoing class action lawsuit between Meta and a group of advertisers, revealed how Facebook pursued a secret project from 2016 to 2019 to analyze its rivals' traffic and analytics, focusing first on Snapchat, then Amazon and YouTube.

Facebook allegedly used a cyber-spying system to track its competitors' users

The operation, known internally as "Project Ghostbusters", was reportedly initiated by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2016, frustrated by the privacy and data encryption measures of rival Snapchat. "Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that, because its traffic is encrypted, we have no analysis about it," Zuckerberg wrote in an email to company executives on June 9, 2016. "Given how fast they are growing, it seems important to find a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Maybe we need to create custom software. You need to find a solution." According to court filings, a team of senior executives and around 41 lawyers worked on the Ghostbusters project.

Mission: intercept and decrypt user traffic

The aim of the "Ghostbusters" project, a reference to the Snapchat logo, was to analyze the behavior of users of the social network. Data was collected via Onavo Protect, a virtual private network (VPN) service acquired by Facebook for $200 million in 2013. Initially presented as a tool to protect user data and save bandwidth, Onavo actually enabled Facebook to collect data on the use of competing applications. How: via a kit integrated into theFacebook application that allowed encrypted traffic to be decrypted. "Thanks to the kit, all the traffic coming from these phones ended up on a server controlled by Facebook," explains Juan Tapiador, professor at the Computer Science Department of Spain's Carlos III University and cybersecurity specialist. "In theory, what they did was see if the traffic came from Snapchat and, if so, they looked at a series of analyses of how users behaved on the app." The spying technique was then reportedly used to discreetly monitor Amazon and YouTube. Onavo VPN was offered for free by Facebook from 2016 and 2019.

The court documents come from a class action lawsuit filed by a group of advertisers in California. What is Facebook, now renamed Meta, accused of: attempting to monopolize the advertising market on social networks between 2016 and 2019. According to the attorneys for the prosecution, "the intended and actual result of this program was to harm competition, including Snapchat, then Facebook's new competitor in social advertising.

As a reminder in the first six months of 2016 the number of Snapchat users rose from nearly 110 million to 148 million. A worrying growth for the giant Facebook, which is losing ground with the younger generations. That same year, Mr. Zuckerberg had proposed to Evan Spiegel, Snap's CEO, to buy his social network for $3 billion. The offer was rejected.

‍