Flutterby™! : Facebook wiretapping Snapchat on your phone

Facebook wiretapping Snapchat on your phone

2024-03-27 00:25:07.776802+01 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

Project Ghostbusters: Facebook Accused of Using Your Phone to Wiretap Snapchat

Meta has lots of data through Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, but that’s not enough for them. Court filings unsealed last week allege Meta created an internal effort to spy on Snapchat in a secret initiative called “Project Ghostbusters.” Meta did so through Onavo, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service the company offered between 2016 and 2019 that, ultimately, wasn’t private at all.

So, uh, mad props to the folks who bought a VPN for privacy. This kinda falls nicely on top of "anti-virus" software makers providing additional attack surface, and Mozilla hiring the foxes to guard the henhouse on privacy...

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: Facebook wiretapping Snapchat on your phone made: 2024-03-27 16:44:58.108562+01 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

TechCrunch: Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal

Court documents Re: Klein v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 3:20-cv-08570-JD (N.D. Cal.) (PDF)

... This code, which included a client-side “kit” that installed a “root” certificate on Snapchat users’ (and later, YouTube and Amazon users’) mobile devices, see PX 414 at 6, PX 26 (PALM- 011683732) (“we install a root CA on the device and MITM all SSL traffic”), also included custom server-side code based on “squid” (an open-source web proxy) through which Facebook’s servers created fake digital certificates to impersonate trusted Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon analytics servers to redirect and decrypt secure traffic from those apps for Facebook’s strategic analysis...

#Comment Re: Facebook wiretapping Snapchat on your phone made: 2024-03-28 02:33:51.46039+01 by: meuon

Wow.. not far from things I have done, although MitMproxy has some awesome tools for it, yeah, Squid would work well.

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