Newly unsealed emails reveal that when Meta was still called Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg ordered his executives to find a way to learn how people were using competing apps like Snapchat, even if the information was encrypted.
Zuckerberg, in a June 2016 email, told Javier Olivan, then Facebook’s head of growth, that he wanted a better answer to questions about Snapchat’s usage and growth than, “because their analytics are encrypted we have no analytics about them.” At the time, Snapchat was still a private company and growing by double digits every quarter.
The correspondence was revealed as part of ongoing litigation in a California federal court, in which Meta is accused of anticompetitive behavior in the social media ads market.
Two months after the email was sent, Facebook launched Stories on Instagram, a photo feature effectively identical to Snapchat’s core feature of disappearing photo posts, that has since become one of Instagram’s most successful features.
“Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them,” Zuckerberg wrote of Snapchat in the email. “Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this,” he directed Olivan.
Olivan, who has since become Meta’s chief operations officer, replied to Zuckerberg’s email saying he had been “looking into this with the Onavo team,” referring to the traffic analysis app that Facebook acquired in 2013, which was already being used for a separate project of gathering samples on how people used their phones beyond Facebook’s apps.
Olivan then passed along Zuckerberg’s email to Guy Rosen, who founded and continued to run Onavo, asking for “out of the box thinking.” Rosen is now Meta’s chief information security officer.
The eventual result was a “task force” within Onavo, internally called the “Ghostbusters project” (Snapchat’s logo is a white cartoon ghost), sometimes called “Project Atlas” and ultimately called the “In-App Action Panel [IAAP],” according to a July 2016 email written to Olivan included in the unsealed court documents.
Decrypting data to track competitors
Facebook’s use of Onavo to get insights into how mobile users interacted with competitors’ apps was the focus of a 2017 story by the Wall Street Journal. The app “doesn’t (can’t) decrypt data,” a Facebook employee noted in an email to Zuckerberg included in a court document.
So in 2016, the task force created new software that could “be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains, allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage (i.e. specific actions that people are performing in the app, rather than just overall app visitation). This is a ‘man-in-the-middle approach,'” the email said.
After publication, a spokesperson replied to a request for comment that “There is nothing new here – this issue was reported on years ago. The plaintiffs’ claims are baseless and completely irrelevant to the case.” While the existence of Onavo’s work to track rival app usage has been reported, details of Meta’s actions, the executives involved, and the surrounding communications were unreported.
These so-called “kits” created a path for Onavo to redirect and decrypt user traffic by effectively impersonating the servers of Snapchat, and later YouTube and Amazon, according to an unsealed letter to the court from the advertiser plaintiffs. Facebook did this through a process called secure sockets layer (SSL) bumping, the letter claimed. SSL is a protocol that encrypts internet traffic.
Advertisers suing Meta said the company failed for years to disclose its use of Onavo technology to intercept rivals’ analytics traffic. They claim the conduct broke wiretapping laws and allowed Facebook to hike its ad rates beyond what it could have charged in a competitive market.
The July 2016 email went on to make clear that third parties would be used to recruit users to install the software and that these users would not see any Onavo branding unless they took the extra step of using a tool like Wireshark to analyze the tool. By 2019, TechCrunch uncovered the Onavo-Facebook link to a “research” app people — including kids as young as 13 — had been paid to download.
Not all of Facebook’s leadership was happy about the company’s efforts to decrypt user traffic on competing platforms. In another letter from the advertising plaintiffs that was just unsealed, a former vice president of security and privacy said of the IAAP: “I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay.” Meta’s former CTO Mike Schroepfer is quoted as saying at the time: “If we ever found out that someone had figured out a way to break encryption on [WhatsApp] we would be really upset.”
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