TECH - Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Accused Of Snooping On Snapchat YouTube And Amazon User Traffic Data To Gain Competitive Edge: Report | Benzinga
Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META) has been accused of initiating a covert project to intercept and decode the network traffic of Snap Inc.’s (NYSE:SNAP) Snapchat users.
What Happened: The project, codenamed “Project Ghostbusters,” was launched in 2016 and was aimed at understanding user behavior and gaining a competitive advantage over Snapchat and other rivals, reported TechCrunch, citing newly unsealed court documents on Tuesday.
The documents were revealed as part of a class-action lawsuit between consumers and Meta, Facebook’s parent company.
As per the documents, the project was part of Facebook’s In-App Action Panel or IAPP program, which used a technique for “intercepting and decrypting” encrypted app traffic from users of Snapchat, and later from users of Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) YouTube and Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN).
Facebook’s engineers allegedly used Onavo, a VPN-like service that Facebook acquired in 2013, to bypass the encryption. The project was later expanded to include Amazon and YouTube.
The document included internal emails, one of which was from Zuckerberg, dated June 9, 2016. In the email, Zuckerberg reportedly ...