this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
339 points (100.0% liked)

Privacy Guides

697 readers
1 users here now

In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.

This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.


You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:

Learn more...


Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!

Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!


This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.


Moderation Rules:

  1. We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
  2. This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
  3. No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
  4. Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
  5. Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
  6. Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
  7. News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
  8. Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
  9. No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
  10. No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
  11. Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
  12. General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.

Additional Resources:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 25 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 52 points 6 months ago (3 children)

On that note, lets federate with threads! (I‘m gonna rub this in for the rest of eternity)

I mean, how braindead does someone have to be to not see that meta is the devil.

Fedipact for the win! :)

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That pink background, ugh. #6F89B4 goes much easier on the eyes and still keeps both black and white fonts perfectly legible

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 2 points 6 months ago

I agree, the background isnt too great. The idea though is gold.

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 3 points 6 months ago

Lovely to see how crazy long that list was!

Quite simply: "Feda is always betta without meta"

[–] ReversalHatchery 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Did you want to say defederate?

[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 5 points 6 months ago

No. I was being sarcastic. Sorry if that wasnt clear.

[–] ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 28 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Yeah but...

Facebook achieved their MITM attack by selling a VPN with spyware in it.

And so you have to wonder: who in his right mind would buy a VPN service from effing Facebook of all companies? It's like asking the KKK to do the catering at your bar mitzvah: if you have a problem with the service, you kind of asked for it.

[–] somas@kbin.social 18 points 6 months ago

@ExtremeDullard

@throws_lemy

Facebook paid kids $20 a month to run this app: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/30/18203803/facebook-research-vpn-minors-data-access-apple

These kids most likely didn’t see it as a VPN at all

[–] noodlejetski@lemm.ee 15 points 6 months ago (1 children)

it was a free app, wasn't owned by Facebook from the beginning (they've acquired it in 2013), and it offered data saving, so it was a tempting install for people with small data plans.

[–] ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

When I was a kid, my parents taught me not to accept free candy from creepy old men.

Kids should be taught not to install VPNs from Big Data for the same reason - and a whole host of other common sense internet hygiene rules.

[–] lud@lemm.ee 3 points 6 months ago

Sure, but you would have to first get people to understand what VPNs are.

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 3 points 6 months ago

And so you have to wonder: who in his right mind would buy a VPN service from effing Facebook of all companies?

I constantly wondered the same thing about sensor-laden VR HMDs, but here we are.

At this point I wonder how many people wouldn't bat an eye if their Facebook account was their national ID.

[–] mrbn@lemmy.ca 24 points 6 months ago
[–] minnix@lemux.minnix.dev 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The project was part of the company’s In-App Action Panel (IAPP) program, which used a technique for “intercepting and decrypting” encrypted app traffic from users of Snapchat, and later from users of YouTube and Amazon, the consumers’ lawyers wrote in the document.

Looks like they didn't decrypt anything, just used MitM spyware.

[–] AnEilifintChorcra@sopuli.xyz 4 points 6 months ago

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-execs-decrypt-rival-apps-usage-snap-youtube-2024-3

This is a 'man-in-the-middle approach,'" the email said.

Yep, this article has more details about it

[–] MacStache@sopuli.xyz 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Why the hell do they even let them operate anymore? Spying on people. That's one of the most illegal things you can fucking do to a person, save bodily harm. Even law enforcement needs a damn permit for it.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 8 points 6 months ago (4 children)

It's a proprietary platform .... what do people expect?

It's visiting someone's business and you are in their property and you are watching TV on their TV set. You are reading newspapers and books that are on their property. And everyone acts surprised when the property owner keeps track of what you watched and what you read on their property.

You have no rights to do anything on their property .... other than the rights they give you, which they can also take away, or just kick you out.

[–] natecox@programming.dev 28 points 6 months ago (1 children)

…what?

This was one company spying on the users of its competitor via unofficial means. Even in the furthest stretch of the corporate boot licking bullshit that “you signed up for the app so you deserve to be spied on” exists in, I don’t see how this scenario is covered.

[–] ZeroCool@slrpnk.net 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

This is just typical Lemmy. User doesn’t read the article but has very strong opinions based on what they imagine it to be about. Comment gets upvoted by a bunch of other users who also didn’t read the article but imagine they know what happened too. Rinse and repeat.

[–] ZeroCool@slrpnk.net 13 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

It's a proprietary platform .... what do people expect?

It's visiting someone's business and you are in their property and you are watching TV on their TV set. You are reading newspapers and books that are on their property. And everyone acts surprised when the property owner keeps track of what you watched and what you read on their property.

You have no rights to do anything on their property .... other than the rights they give you, which they can also take away, or just kick you out.

Are you under the impression that Facebook owns Snapchat? Because they don’t. Nothing about this little “blame people for using proprietary services” rant is actually relevant to what happened. At all.

You should read the article because you clearly didn’t. Hell, all you’d have to do is read the first paragraph to understand they were spying on the users of a competitor.

[–] 4am@lemm.ee 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

~~I think you are thinking of Instagram. Facebook doesn’t own Snapchat.~~

Oh it’s Onavo. Onavo was the “Facebook VPN” software they shuttered in 2019. So it had access to network traffic on-device before it was sent out.

Seems like it was more than a VPN, and put its claws deep into the network stack if it was reading packet buffers before they were encrypted. Not good; I’m sure that users were not made aware of this but in light of this possibility, your point stands.

[–] xilliah 2 points 6 months ago

I like your analogy but from my perspective it isn't fitting.

It would be more like the postal service opening your letters.

[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 8 points 6 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers.

On Tuesday, a federal court in California released new documents discovered as part of the class action lawsuit between consumers and Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an email dated June 9, 2016, which was published as part of the lawsuit.

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.

This is why Facebook engineers proposed using Onavo, which when activated had the advantage of reading all of the device’s network traffic before it got encrypted and sent over the internet.

“We now have the capability to measure detailed in-app activity” from “parsing snapchat [sic] analytics collected from incentivized participants in Onavo’s research program,” read another email.


The original article contains 671 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] dutchkimble@lemy.lol 2 points 6 months ago

It's weird they put shit like that clearly in internal emails, you'd think they'd wanna keep things off the books.

[–] Conyak@lemmy.tf 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

How many times is Facebook going to be caught doing this kind of shit before some real action is taken? They clearly can’t be trusted. Let’s add them to the same TikTok ban at this point.