Facebook secretly spied on Snapchat usage to confuse advertisers, court docs say

[RecycledEle]

I previously posted on another topic that when a corporation commits C crimes that each carry Y years in confinement (prison time or jail time,) the total years in confinement (C * Y) should be divided by the share of the corporation someone owns and that stockholder should be sentenced to that amount of time. So if a stockholder owns 1/S of a company, that stockholder should be sentenced to CY/S years.

If Facebook committed 100 billion felonies (where each intercepted message is a felony,) and each would carry 5 years in prison if I did it, then there are 500 billion years in confinement to divide between the stock holders. If someone owns $1,024 of Facebook stock (which is one-one-billionth of the total) then that stick holder would be sentenced to 500 years in confinement in a just system.

We do not have a just system, but there are those if us who will fight for one.

Perhaps the boys and girls at fed.gov can move 0.0001% of the way towards justice by seizing Facebook, liquidating the company, and handing out any money that is left to the people whose accounts were spied on.

Of course all if this assumes that each and every employee or former employee or contractor at Facebook who knew about this never, ever gets out of confinement.

[lesserknowndan]

How on earth does one App man in the middle another App’s traffic? This is a huge security vulnerability! If Facebook can install an App like this on iOS or Android, then other companies could do a similar thing.

Has this been fixed since?

[landgenoot]

> How on earth does one App man in the middle another App’s traffic?

By providing a VPN

https://beyondmachines.net/event_details/facebook-spied-on-c...

[elevatedastalt]

I will save you the long read. They paid people (incl teens) through third-parties (so that it's not easily traced to FB) to install kits on their phones to let them MITM Snapchat analytics traffic.

[FloatArtifact]

Wouldn't the private individual be arrested for hacking if they set up such a scheme?

[cute_boi]

After all these bombshells, I think Facebook is more dangerous than Tiktok....

[derelicta]

No you don't understand! When it's an American company doing it, its okay!

[ChrisArchitect]

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39832952

[odyssey7]

Imagine if the DOJ case against Apple prevails and rivals begin distributing their own iOS apps through alternate app stores and obtain unencumbered access to currently-private system APIs.

[SR2Z]

This is silly. Open platforms use TLS, too, and there's no epidemic of trivial failures of encryption; you can't just add root certs willy-nilly because crypto engineers knew that was the most obvious attack vector.

FB did this by paying folk to consensually MITM their own traffic, and frankly any system that wouldn't allow users to do that on their own devices is a bad one.

[dogleash]

Interesting thought. Perhaps the cat-and-mouse game of megacorps defending/expanding their turf through software/hardware boundaries isn't the best mechanism to achieve consumer protection.

If only there was something like consumer protection law. But you know, did consumer protection instead of waging proxy wars for megacorps to defend/expand their turf.