Facebook’s ‘Ghostbusters Project’: Inside the Secretive Data Collection Initiative to Gain a Competitive Advantage Over Snapchat

Facebook, in an effort to stay competitive with Snapchat, secretly launched a project known as ‘Ghostbusters’ to analyze user traffic. According to court documents, Meta, the current owner of Facebook, used its VPN service Onavo to gather encrypted information about user interactions with Snapchat. This was part of a broader initiative to analyze market trends using user data.

While the use of Onavo for data analysis was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal in 2017, new court case documents have shed more light on the extent of Facebook’s data collection practices. Following the closure of Onavo in 2019, a lawsuit was filed against Facebook alleging deceptive practices and anti-competitive behavior.

Recently disclosed documents show that Facebook’s ‘Ghostbusters Project’ aimed to gather data on user interactions with rival apps like Snapchat, YouTube and Amazon. By intercepting and analyzing encrypted traffic, Facebook sought to gain valuable insights into user behavior and market trends. The project utilized Onavo to implement a ‘man in the middle’ technique to spy on user data.

Court documents indicate that the ‘Ghostbusters Project’ was in operation between 2016 and 2019, highlighting the lengths to which Facebook went to gain a competitive advantage over its rivals. The revelation of these practices underscores the larger debate around tech companies’ use of user data and their potential impact on competition in the marketplace.