Facebook’s top secret ‘Project Ghostbusters’ spied on Snapchat, documents reveal

Spying tool ordered by Mark Zuckerberg provided ‘detailed in-app activity’ of rivals

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies remotely during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on 17 November, 2020 in Washington, DC (Getty Images)

Facebook carried out a secret spying campaign into Snapchat user data, according to unsealed court filings.

The operation, known internally as ‘Project Ghostbusters’, was initiated by chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in 2016 after he became frustrated with the privacy measures of his competitor.

“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them,” Mr Zuckerberg wrote in an email to company executives on 9 June, 2016.

“Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.”

The court documents show that Javier Olivan, who now serves as Facebook’s chief operating officer, replied to the email: “Fully agree that this was one of the most important market analysis questions we need to answer.”

The wiretapping tool involved the company’s Onavo Virtual Private Network (VPN), which Facebook acquired from an Israeli firm in 2013 but is no longer in use.

Owning Onavo allowed Facebook to monitor rival social media apps by “intercepting and decrypting” network traffic sent between the apps and its servers, according to the court documents.

Following MrZuckerberg’s 2016 email, Onavo engineers developed kits to carry out ‘man-in-the-middle’ monitoring that allowed them “to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic”.

The spying technique, which gave the ability to “measure detailed in-app activity’, was later used on Amazon and YouTube.

The newly unsealed court documents come from a class action lawsuit in California taken up by consumers against Facebook’s parent company Meta.

According to the prosecuting lawyers, “the intended and actual result of this program was to harm competition, including Facebook’s then-nascent Social Advertising competitor Snapchat.

The Independent has reached out to Meta and Snapchat’s parent company Snap for comment.