Facebook Secretly Wiretapped Competitors

2024-03-28 • SEND FEEDBACK |
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re: security

re: Facebook and Its Ilk Are a DiseaseWhy isn’t Zuckerberg et all over at Rikers enjoying a nice rat breakfast?

Facebook Secretly Wiretapped Competitors: Documents

2024-03-27

Facebook violated federal law with its secret program, according to some lawyers.

Facebook secretly obtained proprietary data from competitors, including Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents

At the request of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook officials developed a program called In-App Action Panel (IAAP) that they deployed in 2016, and the program was in use through mid-2019, according to the documents, which include internal emails.

The program used cyberattacks to intercept information from Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon. The program then decrypted the information.

Lawyers said in one of the documents, “Facebook’s IAAP Program used nation-state-level hacking technology developed by the company’s Onavo team, in which Facebook paid contractors (including teens) to designate Facebook a trusted ‘root’ certificate authority on their mobile devices, then generated fake digital certificates to redirect secure Snapchat analytics traffic (and later, analytics from YouTube and Amazon) from Snapchat’s servers to Onavo’s; decrypted these analytics and used them for competitive gain, including to inform Facebook’s product strategy; reencrypted them; and sent them up to Snapchat’s servers as though it came straight from Snapchat’s app, with Facebook’s Social Advertising competitor none the wiser.”

Violation of Law

Facebook’s actions amounted to wiretapping and violated federal law.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, sometimes known as the Wiretap Act, bars people from intercepting any “wire, oral, or electronic communication” and from intentionally disclosing the contents of information that was illegally intercepted.

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MPG: the rich and powerful are rarely held accountable, unless they’re the wrong political persuasion.

Back in 2018, I wrote:

MPG has long advised against Facebook and its ilk.

Facebook and similar are massive and incredibly sophisticated surveillence tools by design.

Recent events were inevitable and are trivial. That is, if the implications are properly understood of the massive threat these services pose, e.g., paving a superhighway to a totalitarian Orwellian state the likes of which could only be envied by past States, with China leading the race.

I don’t know who is lame enough to use Facebook these days anyway. Young people don’t. It’s a godawful platform. Boycott it!