Meta & Facebook Engineers 'Figure Out' Snapchat's Encryption
March 29, 2024•296 words
There's a simple reason why people have been asking for encryption on their mobile and computer devices for the past 15 years.
The public wants privacy from governments, companies, and organizations. I have yet to meet one person who does not mind any of those three organizations prying into a person's personal or social life via their mobile device or computer device.
In the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, people were shocked to find out that specific government organizations and police services were using particular technologies for surveillance via telephone taps against specific individuals.
In 2016-2020, the CEO of Facebook at the time, Mark Z., said,
"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics on them," the letter from Zuckerberg reads. "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."
The lawsuit claims that Meta intercepted personal data from Snapchat users, leveraged Facebook to gain an unfair edge, and raised advertising costs.
Facebook software engineers created a program, an In-App Action Panel," or IAPP "Project Ghostbusters," aimed at circumventing Snapchat's encryption via a "man-in-the-middle approach" to gather user activity data.
If proven true, these illegal actions can have ramifications for other social media companies, governments, and organizations with broader regulatory scrutiny over such practices.
My question is, how many companies and organizations use mobile kits such as the In-App Action Panel (IAPP) to snoop on, watch, or monitor their employees?