secret

In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents. The newly released documents reveal how Meta tried to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors, including Snapchat and later Amazon and YouTube, by analyzing the network traffic of how its users were interacting with Meta’s competitors. Given that Snapchat encrypted the traffic between the app and its servers, this network analysis technique was not going to be effective. Later, according to the court documents, Facebook expanded the program to Amazon and YouTube.