I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.
In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.
"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.
"Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."
Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.
I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The documents were filed in a class-action lawsuit from consumers and advertisers, accusing Meta of anticompetitive behavior that blocks rivals from competing in the social media ads market.
"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who has since rebranded his company as Meta) wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.
The IAAP program's purpose was to gather granular insights into users' engagement with rival apps to help Facebook develop products as needed to stay ahead of competitors.
Olivan was told that these so-called "kits" used a "man-in-the-middle" attack typically employed by hackers to secretly intercept data passed between two parties.
Mike Schroepfer, then-chief technology officer, argued that Facebook wouldn't want rivals to employ a similar program analyzing their encrypted user data.
While the unsealed emails detailing the project have recently raised eyebrows, Meta's spokesperson told Ars that "there is nothing new here—this issue was reported on years ago.
The original article contains 925 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!