Jeff LarsonMar 27, 2024

Look, I went over the Snowden documents as a journalist, but I never saw anything that shocked me quite like this story of Meta buying a VPN company for "security" but then spying on users of competitive apps by decrypting the traffic.

This is a real SSL added and removed here :) moment.

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

Court document: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.369872/gov.uscourts.cand.369872.735.0.pdf

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 threadJeff LarsonMar 27, 2024

also, can I say that it's completely nuts that, according to the complaint, 41 (forty one!) lawyers looked at this and were like:

"seems cool"

MY DUDES THE WIRETAP ACT IS RIGHT THERE.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.369872/gov.uscourts.cand.369872.735.0.pdf

Show threadfelix (grayscale) 🐺Mar 27, 2024
@seriouslyjeff the current reporting is a little misleading. The thing being discussed is not the VPN app, it's a "Facebook Research App" that used code from the VPN. It was definitely opt in and told users that it was going to snoop on them, though it's not clear how much users understood what exactly it snooped. There are a bunch of articles about it from 2019, when is was shut down
Show threadJeff Larson
@gray17 might be worth looking at the wiretap act: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511
18 U.S. Code § 2511 - Interception and disclosure of wire, oral, or electronic communications prohibited

LII / Legal Information Institute
Mar 27, 2024 at 6:37pmWeb
Show threadfelix (grayscale) 🐺Mar 27, 2024
@seriouslyjeff sure. Facebook's argument at the time was that what they were doing was not materially different from the surveillance that companies do to their own employees. Apple disagreed, others disagreed, and that's why the program was stopped
Show threadJeff LarsonMar 27, 2024
@gray17 cool