Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Created Secret ‘Project Ghostbusters’ to Snoop on Snapchat, Other Rivals

Javier Olivan, then Facebook’s head of growth, responded that he had been “looking into this with the Onavo team,” referring to the VPN app Facebook acquired in 2013. Olivan tasked Guy Rosen, Onavo’s founder, to come up with “out of the box thinking” to address Zuckerberg’s request.

By July 2016, the Onavo team had developed software that could intercept and decrypt traffic from specific domains on iOS and Android devices. An internal email described the approach as a “‘man-in-the-middle’ approach” that allowed Facebook to “read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage.”

The covert data collection, dubbed “Project Ghostbusters” in reference to Snapchat’s ghost logo, continued for at least three years, expanding to include YouTube and Amazon. However, not all Facebook executives were comfortable with the project.

“I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay,” wrote Pedro Canahuati, Facebook’s then-head of security engineering, in an internal email. “No security person is ever comfortable with this, no matter what consent we get from the general public. The general public just doesn’t know how this stuff works.”

Despite these concerns, Project Ghostbusters proceeded under Zuckerberg’s directive to gain a competitive advantage over rival apps. The unsealed documents also reveal that Facebook used third parties to recruit users to install the software, with no visible Onavo branding unless users took extra steps to analyze the tool.