A range of unsealed emails have gone on to reveal some shocking confessions related to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The incident dates back to when Meta was still referred to as Facebook when Zuckerberg ordered his line of executives to learn how rival apps were functioning and how users were engaging with it.
While normally this kind of data is encrypted, the Facebook CEO ordered them to bypass that to get as much data about competing rivals like Snapchat.
The email dates to June of 2016 when the company’s head of growth was ordered by the CEO to provide better replies to queries regarding Snap’s usage and growth at that period.
Since the data was encrypted and hard to retrieve, he ordered the executives to get the best analytics somehow. And remember, this was a time when Snap was awfully popular with growth reaching double digits for each quarter.
The correspondence had to do with a very integral part of an investigation taking place at the federal court in California. This is where the tech giant was accused of indulging in serious anti-competitive acts linked to the advertising market of the social media industry.
Just two months after that email, we saw Facebook generate its own version of Stories through Instagram. And needless to say, it was a replica of the core feature found on the Snapchat app which entailed photo posts that disappeared with time. And surprise, today it’s the most successful rollout for the company to date.
The fact that the app is growing so quickly with time really proves so much. It seems to be an awfully pivotal means to getting your hands on serious analytics about competition to achieve your own gains. And Zuckerberg's ordering different methods to get the desirable targets was certainly a point worth mentioning.
Today, the same person is Meta’s COO and he had replied to the email with how he was working hard with the Onavo team to get the results as it dealt with traffic analysis which Facebook took ownership of in the year 2013. Furthermore, plenty of out-of-the-box thinking was conducted by a man who is now Meta’s leading information security officer.
The email talks about this being hailed as a Ghostbusters project whose main goal was to track data belonging to competitors.
So what happened is that a task force came into play in terms of new software development that would be installed on iOS and Android. It would intercept traffic in certain domains and give rise to data that could be easily read via the middleman approach.
But after this news was published, one rep for the company added how there’s nothing majorly new here. The matter was discussed in the past when it was first reported. Claims added by plaintiffs are mostly baseless and quite irrelevant.
The kits designed to have traffic redirected and decrypted by copying Snapchat servers and then Amazon and YouTube too was just another serious process to get as much detail as possible on this front through SSL.
Let’s not forget how advertisers even filed a lawsuit against Meta for not disclosing Onavo tech to have rivals’ data intercepted. This broke laws linked to Facebook hiking advertising rates beyond what was charged in the competitive market of today.
What’s interesting is how the leaked email explained how third parties could recruit users to have the software installed and then this way, the use of Onavo branding wouldn’t be disclosed.
Image: DIW-AIgen
Read next: Court Rejects Meta’s Plea To Dismiss Privacy Invasion Claims Made By Online Taxpayers
The incident dates back to when Meta was still referred to as Facebook when Zuckerberg ordered his line of executives to learn how rival apps were functioning and how users were engaging with it.
While normally this kind of data is encrypted, the Facebook CEO ordered them to bypass that to get as much data about competing rivals like Snapchat.
The email dates to June of 2016 when the company’s head of growth was ordered by the CEO to provide better replies to queries regarding Snap’s usage and growth at that period.
Since the data was encrypted and hard to retrieve, he ordered the executives to get the best analytics somehow. And remember, this was a time when Snap was awfully popular with growth reaching double digits for each quarter.
The correspondence had to do with a very integral part of an investigation taking place at the federal court in California. This is where the tech giant was accused of indulging in serious anti-competitive acts linked to the advertising market of the social media industry.
Just two months after that email, we saw Facebook generate its own version of Stories through Instagram. And needless to say, it was a replica of the core feature found on the Snapchat app which entailed photo posts that disappeared with time. And surprise, today it’s the most successful rollout for the company to date.
The fact that the app is growing so quickly with time really proves so much. It seems to be an awfully pivotal means to getting your hands on serious analytics about competition to achieve your own gains. And Zuckerberg's ordering different methods to get the desirable targets was certainly a point worth mentioning.
Today, the same person is Meta’s COO and he had replied to the email with how he was working hard with the Onavo team to get the results as it dealt with traffic analysis which Facebook took ownership of in the year 2013. Furthermore, plenty of out-of-the-box thinking was conducted by a man who is now Meta’s leading information security officer.
The email talks about this being hailed as a Ghostbusters project whose main goal was to track data belonging to competitors.
So what happened is that a task force came into play in terms of new software development that would be installed on iOS and Android. It would intercept traffic in certain domains and give rise to data that could be easily read via the middleman approach.
But after this news was published, one rep for the company added how there’s nothing majorly new here. The matter was discussed in the past when it was first reported. Claims added by plaintiffs are mostly baseless and quite irrelevant.
The kits designed to have traffic redirected and decrypted by copying Snapchat servers and then Amazon and YouTube too was just another serious process to get as much detail as possible on this front through SSL.
Let’s not forget how advertisers even filed a lawsuit against Meta for not disclosing Onavo tech to have rivals’ data intercepted. This broke laws linked to Facebook hiking advertising rates beyond what was charged in the competitive market of today.
What’s interesting is how the leaked email explained how third parties could recruit users to have the software installed and then this way, the use of Onavo branding wouldn’t be disclosed.
Read next: Court Rejects Meta’s Plea To Dismiss Privacy Invasion Claims Made By Online Taxpayers
