How did Meta become the world’s largest player in the cutthroat industry of social media? New documents from an ongoing class action suit against the company over anticompetitive behavior reveal some of the specific ways it tackled rivals in recent years. One of them was using software made by a mobile data analytics company called Onavo in 2016 to access user activities on Snapchat, and eventually Amazon and YouTube, too.
Facebook acquired Onavo in 2013 and shut it down in 2019 after a TechCrunch report revealed that the company was paying teenagers to use the software to collect user data.
In 2020, two Facebook users filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Meta, then called Facebook, alleging the company engaged in anticompetitive practices and exploited user data. In 2023, the plaintiffs’ attorney Brian J. Dunne submitted documents listing how Facebook used Onavo’s software to spy on competitors, including Snapchat.
According to the documents, made public this week, the Onavo team pitched and launched a project codenamed “Ghostbusters”—in reference to the Snapchat logo—where they developed “kits that can be installed on iOS or Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains,” allowing them “to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage.”
The documents also included a presentation from the Onavo team to Mark Zuckerberg showing that they had the ability to track “detailed in-app activity” by “parsing Snapchat analytics collected from incentivized participants in Onavo’s program.” Meta’s chief operating officer Javier Olivian, who was head of central products at the time, is noted throughout the document for his collaboration with the Onavo team, including its founder Guy Rosen.
The technology was used to do the same to YouTube from 2017 to 2018 and Amazon in 2018, according to the documents. “The intended and actual result of this program was to harm competition, including Facebook’s then-nascent Social Advertising competitor Snapchat,” the document alleged.
Meta is significantly bigger than Snapchat in both its audience reach and financial scale. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads currently claims a market cap of $1.24 trillion, while Snapchat’s parent company Snap is worth just $19 billion. Snapchat has 800 million monthly active users, which pale in comparison to Facebook’s three billion and Instagram’s two billion.
Meta is one of the tech giants under antitrust investigation by the European Union. It’s one of the six companies (along with Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, ByteDance and Microsoft) designated as “gatekeepers” in the digital economy under the E.U.’s newly enacted Digital Markets Act.