Meta tried to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors, including Snapchat and later Amazon and YouTube, by analyzing the network traffic of how its users were interacting with Meta’s competitors. Given these apps’ use of encryption, Facebook needed to develop special technology to get around it.
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.
After Zuckerberg’s email, the 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,” read an email from July 2016. “This is a ‘man-in-the-middle’ approach.”
A man-in-the-middle attack — nowadays also called adversary-in-the-middle — is an attack where hackers intercept internet traffic flowing from one device to another over a network. When the network traffic is unencrypted, this type of attack allows the hackers to read the data inside, such as usernames, passwords, and other in-app activity.
And people want to let these parasites integrate into the fediverse
honest question: why does it matter? all data in any fediverse project is public anyways
For me it’s not really about the data, it’s unforseen malicious maneuvers outside data. Sabotaging instances, manipulating feeds for their gain, or try to still centralize the fediverse undermining the whole concept. My point is, we don’t know what bad thing they could/would do, they are creative. But we sure as fuck know it’s an evil organization and they can’t be trusted.
that’s fair. I fully believe they could pull some fuckery that would make everything worse
Delete this shit from your phones asap
Zuck Fuckerberg
Can’t delete something that was never there in the first place
The world would be a better place if Mark Zuckerberg accidentally got sucked into a jetski engine somehow
Every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes.
Lock that turd up already
Certainly they weren’t planning on actually planning on finding a way to get people to install a VPN to decrypt their traffic just to use Facebook, right?
That’s why they paid teenagers to use the VPN so they could get some “guerrilla market research”.
Even in 2013 apps didn’t have the permission access to install a device level VPN without some unspecified exploit. 0 chance Facebook would literally hack people’s phones, right?
Wait, how does a VPN break TLS encryption?
it doesn’t, what this is suggesting is the vpn was routing traffic through it so they could analyze snapchat traffic. not the contents of it but essentially meta analysis of the traffic. how often it was sending data, how much data, where it was going etc.
this is the answer
