Social media users’ freedoms continue to be eroded, as court documents have revealed Facebook spied on SnapChat, while the US government asked YouTube to identify certain users. In what has been named the top secret “Project Ghostbusters,” Meta’s Facebook has been found out to be spying on data from its competitor platform SnapChat. The technique was used to gather intel on users on competitor platforms and gave the ability to “measure detailed in-app activity,” and was later used on Amazon and YouTube as well. The court documents were unsealed last week, and are from a California class action lawsuit by consumers against Meta. They detail Facebook’s secret spying campaign, initiated by CEO Mark Zuckerberg eight years ago, per Yahoo News. In emails from 2016, Zuckerberg appears to have been frustrated with SnapChat’s privacy precautions. “Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them,” Zuckerberg complained to Facebook executives in a June 9, 2016, email. “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.”Javier Olivan, who is now COO, wrote back that he “fully agree(s) that this was one of the most important market analysis questions we need to answer.”Facebook bought a no-longer-in-use wiretapping tool from Israel in 2013, and it was used in the company’s Onavo Virtual Private Network (VPN), functionally allowing the social media giant to monitor rival social media. The VPN works by “intercepting and decrypting” network traffic moving between the apps and its servers, court documents show. After the CEO’s 2016 email, Onavo engineers developed what Facebook court documents call “man-in-the-middle” monitoring which enabled them “to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic”.“The intended and actual result of this program was to harm competition, including Facebook’s then-nascent Social Advertising competitor Snapchat,” said prosecution. Meanwhile, the US federal government issued two court orders for Google’s YouTube to identify anyone who viewed certain videos and livestreams more than once. The orders have been called “unconstitutional” by privacy experts, according to recently unsealed Kentucky court documents obtained by Forbes. Federal investigators compelled Google to provide the personal information of all viewers who viewed videos from the handle “elonmuskwhm,” due to suspicions of bitcoin misuse and money laundering, and provide the names, addresses, phone numbers, and user data activity for all who viewed any videos from this handle between January 1 and January 8, 2023. Officials also moved to collect the IP addresses of people who watched the videos without being logged on to YouTube. “There is reason to believe that these records would be relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, including by providing identification information about the perpetrators,” police said, according to the court documents. “No one should fear a knock at the door from police simply because of what the YouTube algorithm serves up.”"With all law enforcement demands, we have a rigorous process designed to protect the privacy and constitutional rights of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement,” said Google spokesperson Matt Bryant.“We examine each demand for legal validity, consistent with developing case law, and we routinely push back against overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands for user data, including objecting to some demands entirely."
