Documents from the meta-class action lawsuit have been made public that detail how the company formerly known as Facebook has been intercepting and decrypting people's web traffic. But we're not talking about WhatsApp traffic or messenger or any other traffic that's encrypted by Facebook within an app that they own. No, the traffic in question here was going to platforms like Snapchat, YouTube and Amazon that have nothing to do with Facebook. That's right, even if you have never used any of Facebook's services ever, they were still able to collect data about you. And they were doing it in a very sinister way. Because whenever you visit YouTube, Amazon or any of these platforms, your connection to them is encrypted, right? Now, these platforms that are doing the encryption for you, they are able to track your activity within the platform, obviously. And then they package up this data and they sell it off because it's worth a lot of money. I mean, that analytical data about all these people on these giant platforms is very valuable. And that's why those companies have invested interest in making sure that nobody but them has access to it and the ability to sell it or improve their applications or anything like that. So in order for Facebook to get meaningful information out of this encrypted data, they did an SSL man in the middle attack on those encrypted connections. So it's understand how Facebook was able to do this. We have to go back to 2013 when they acquired an Israeli-based VPN and mobile data analytics company called ANOVO. Before the acquisition, this company's app had won prizes for its seamless data compression technology. You know, back then, mobile data was a lot slower and it was a lot more expensive. So being able to compress your traffic and manage the traffic of your apps, you know, figure out what apps are using a lot of your traffic in the background and using up your bandwidth, could literally save you hundreds of dollars every year. But once Facebook got their hands on this app, they basically turned it into all-out spyware. So back in 2018, Facebook integrated an ad for ANOVO directly into the Facebook iOS app itself under the banner Protect in the navigation menu. Clicking through on this Protect banner would redirect Facebook users to the ANOVO Protect VPN security apps listing inside of their respective app store. The app would promise to protect your web traffic with encryption and even save you some bandwidth by compressing your data just like the original ANOVO app did. But in addition, this app would backdoor your device and allow Facebook to spy on traffic for any app that you were using on your phone. One of ANOVO's product managers, under Facebook, responded to these claims, these spying claims in 2018 by saying, like other VPNs, it, meaning ANOVO, acts as a secure connection to protect people from potentially harmful sites. The app may collect your mobile data traffic to help us recognize tactics that bad actors use. Over time, this helps the tool work better for you and others. We let people know about this activity in other ways that ANOVO uses and analyzes data before they download the app. Ah yes, we're just collecting traffic because it's for your safety. We're trying to protect you, right? Where have we heard that one before? The real motive behind this data collection was to analyze how users engaged with Facebook's competitors like Snapchat so that they could integrate features like stories into Instagram in order to compete with them and see the direct impact on engagement that this feature had across more than 33 million devices that had the ANOVO app installed on them in real time. Or in the case of TBH and anonymous team compliance social media app, Facebook used their spyware to get insider knowledge on how the app was gaining popularity so that they could quickly make an offer to acquire the app before anyone else could or before the app could get popular enough to become a Facebook competitor itself. This spyware, which Facebook internally called Project Ghostbuster in reference to Snapchat's logo, included a client-side kit that installed a root certificate for Snapchat users and then later for YouTube and Amazon users on their mobile devices. Facebook also uploaded custom server-side code based on squid to their ANOVO servers that would create fake digital certificates to impersonate Snapchat, YouTube or Amazon's analytic servers, bump the SSL encryption, and then route the decrypted traffic to Facebook's analytic servers, and then re-encrypt the traffic and route it over to YouTube, Amazon, etc.'s analytic servers as if nothing happened. Internal emails from Facebook confirm that they knew what they were doing was malicious. They literally used the words, man in the middle, within the email, the only difference is they called it an approach instead of an attack. They even discussed ways to further conceal the spyware kit by getting third-party market research companies to redistribute it with their branding slapped on top of it, and that people using the spyware wouldn't know that it was connecting back to ANOVO aka Facebook unless they inspected the traffic of the app with a tool like Wireshark. This activity is blatantly illegal. It goes beyond just corporate espionage, I mean Facebook's spied on the traffic of millions of Americans. If any normal person was guilty of doing this, they'd be labeled a cyber terrorist and they'd be locked up for the rest of their life, but with Facebook, they just ended up paying a relatively small fee compared to the company's value, and they'd get to go on free to come up with their next scheme to harvest unsuspecting people's data. Simply not using Facebook's products clearly isn't enough to make sure that your data isn't being collected by them. More extreme measures like blacklisting all of Facebook's domains in your DNS settings is going to be required in order to make sure that third-party applications that are bundled with Facebook-owned software are not stripping the encryption from your traffic, sending it to Facebook servers, and then re-encrypting it and sending the traffic to its destination as if nothing happened. And as people start doing this to avoid being spied on by Facebook, it's going to be important for application developers to make sure that they aren't using any of Facebook's technology that can be back-dored with the spyware whenever they're developing their apps. This is getting harder to do as the number of companies that are under the Facebook umbrella continues to grow, but it's really the only way forward because the US in pressure from other foreign governments clearly isn't enough to stop Facebook. And the fact that nobody at Facebook is being held criminally liable for man in the middleing everybody's internet connections, the kind of thing that if some other foreign nation state were to do it, we might go to war with them. The fact that nothing's happening to Facebook for doing this just goes to show you how much they've bought off our government.