Chuck DarwinFacebook new tracking revelations
"#Facebook’s #IAAP program conduct was not merely anticompetitive, but criminal," read the filings revealed on March 26, 2024, by a federal court in California during the class action lawsuit between consumers and Meta.
Facebook used its #OnavoVPN system to illegally track its users when accessing Snapchat and other competitors' apps, new unsealed court filings can reveal.
So-called Project #Ghostbusters—echoing the iconic rival's logo—appears to have been just the beginning of the wider "In App Action Panel" ( #IAAP ) program which aimed to spy on competitors' traffic to gain commercial advantage.
It's thought to have run between June 2016 and approximately May 2019, with YouTube and Amazon being the next targets.
#Meta, Facebook's parent company, employed its controversial #VPN service as a way to intercept and decrypt the traffic between the people accessing its service and competitors' servers.
The company shut down #Onavo in 2019, following a TechCrunch investigation revealing the #spyware-like VPN software was employed in a research project to collect sensitive user data from paid volunteers aged between 13 and 25.