Every social media platform is bound to have privacy and security scandals. Because of that in 2024 there are still individuals who do not have any social media accounts and or are active on the web. TechCrunch earlier this morning reported that Facebook had been spying on the traffic of Snapchat users.
This spying activity happened in 2016 through Project Ghosbusters because of the Snapchat icon that looks like a fictional ghost. In a court hearing between Meta and users, documents about this project were made public. Because user traffic on competing social media platforms is encrypted, it is difficult for Facebook to track their competitors.
Project Ghostbusters is run by the Onavo team, which is a VPN-like service that was acquired by Facebook in 2013. The team successfully developed an iOS and Android application that can view application usage traffic. After Facebook snooped on Snapchat user traffic, they turned to YouTube and Amazon.
This court hearing is for Facebook who is accused of defrauding users for data collection activities and misusing the data that has been obtained. The case was filed by Sarah Grabert and Maximilian Klein in 2020.
