Silicon Valley and other major institutions burned a lot of credibility over the last few years.
People are getting much more vigilant about Big Tech.
And Mark Zuckerberg may have been caught doing one thing that will send a chill down your spine.
Meta CEO and Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg has faced a lot of public scrutiny over the past few years.
There have long been privacy concerns about Facebook, and the company settled a $725 million class-action lawsuit over the issue.
Facebook collusion
FOIA requests showed that Zuckerberg censored true information regarding COVID at the behest of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Now Zuckerberg is in trouble for allegedly spying on people using competitors’ apps.
Recent court documents detailed an internal Facebook initiative called “Project Ghostbusters,” which was aimed at Snapchat users.
TechCrunch reported that 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. . .Facebook called this ‘Project Ghostbusters,’ in a clear reference to Snapchat’s ghost-like logo.”
Facebook got caught creating dummy accounts for people who never even signed up for the platform simply by networking users’ publicly shared data, so Project Ghostbusters is right up the company’s alley.
Spying on competitors
According to documents, Zuckerberg wrote in a June 2016 email, “Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them. . .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.”
Zuckerberg was clearly concerned about acquiring data on his competitors by any means necessary.
Soon after, Zuckerberg’s plan was put into action.
TechCrunch added that “Facebook’s engineers’ solution was to use Onavo, a VPN-like service that Facebook acquired in 2013. In 2019, Facebook shut down Onavo after a TechCrunch investigation revealed that Facebook had been secretly paying teenagers to use Onavo so the company could access all of their web activity. . .[T]he Onavo team took on the project and a month later proposed a solution: so-called kits that can be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific subdomains, ‘allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage.’”
Some within the company shared their concerns.
Pedro Canahuati, the then-head of security engineering, wrote in an email, “I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay. 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.”
Zuckerberg could again be in hot water of privacy and security concerns.
His behavior is proof positive of why Big Tech companies should not be given the benefit of the doubt.
Stay tuned to Unmuzzled News for any updates to this ongoing story.
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Author: rg_jk
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