🇺🇸 FACEBOOK’S “PRIVACY” VPN WAS ACTUALLY A SURVEILLANCE GOLDMINE

In 2013, Facebook acquired Israeli startup Onavo for around $150M, pitching it as a VPN to protect user data and expand global internet access. In reality, it became one of Meta’s most powerful spyware tools.

Onavo Protect funneled mobile traffic through Facebook’s servers, giving the company unparalleled visibility into rival apps - including Snapchat, WhatsApp, YouTube, and Amazon.

When Snapchat's encrypted traffic proved too secure, Facebook launched “Project Ghostbusters”, a Zuckerberg-backed plan to run man-in-the-middle attacks using custom kits to decrypt in-app activity.

That surveillance helped drive the creation of Instagram Stories, the $19B WhatsApp acquisition, and countless feature clones across Facebook’s empire.

Apple banned Onavo in 2018. Facebook rebranded it as Facebook Research, secretly paying teens as young as 13 to install root certificates for total phone access - until Apple revoked Facebook’s internal app privileges in 2019.

Onavo is dead, but the lawsuits aren’t.

Meta is now facing wiretap accusations and antitrust cases that say the quiet part out loud: they called it privacy. It was always surveillance.

Sources: Bloomberg, TechCrunch, WSJ, @itsalexvacca