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Chiara Castro

Facebook's Onavo VPN used to wiretap competitor data, court filings reveal

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, is sworn in to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled "Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis," in Dirksen building on Wednesday, January 31, 2024.

Facebook used its Onavo VPN system to illegally track its users when accessing Snapchat and other competitors' apps, new unsealed court filings can reveal.

So-called Project Ghostbusters—echoing the iconic rival's logo—appears to have been just the beginning of the wider In App Action Panel (IAAP) program which aimed to spy on competitors' traffic to gain commercial advantage. It's thought to have run between June 2016 and approximately May 2019, with YouTube and Amazon being the next targets.

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