Lorenzo Franceschi-BicchieraiMar 26, 2024

NEW: Facebook snooped on Snapchat users' encrypted network traffic to study how they behaved, unsealed court documents reveal.

This was part of a secret program called "Project Ghostbusters," and even inside the company, it was very controversial.

“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,” Pedro Canahuati, Facebook's then-head of security engineering, wrote in an email.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/facebook-secret-project-snooped-snapchat-user-traffic/

Facebook snooped on users' Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal | TechCrunch

A secret program called "Project Ghostbusters" saw Facebook devise a way to intercept and decrypt the encrypted network traffic of Snapchat users to study their behavior.

TechCrunch
Show threadLurkieMar 27, 2024
@lorenzofb the link to the document on that page seems to be from a different case
Show threadfelix (grayscale) 🐺Mar 27, 2024
@desttinghim @lorenzofb this seems to be the right doc
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.369872/gov.uscourts.cand.369872.735.0.pdf
Show threadfelix (grayscale) 🐺
@desttinghim @lorenzofb It's unclear from the document and current reporting, but this was the "Facebook Research App" which used code from Onava. It wasn't the Onava VPN itself. There are a number of articles from 2019 when FRA was shut down, which talk about how the app asked the user to install a root certificate, and supposedly got informed consent from users for its aggressive snooping of their encrypted behavior.
Mar 27, 2024 at 4:19amPhanpy