Meta tried to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors, including Snapchat and later Amazon and YouTube, by analyzing the network traffic of how its users were interacting with Meta’s competitors. Given these apps’ use of encryption, Facebook needed to develop special technology to get around it.

Facebook’s engineers solution was to use Onavo, a VPN-like service that Facebook acquired in 2013. In 2019, Facebook shut down Onavo after a TechCrunch investigation revealed that Facebook had been secretly paying teenagers to use Onavo so the company could access all of their web activity.

After Zuckerberg’s email, the Onavo team took on the project and a month later proposed a solution: so-called kits that can be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific subdomains, “allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage,” read an email from July 2016. “This is a ‘man-in-the-middle’ approach.”

A man-in-the-middle attack — nowadays also called adversary-in-the-middle — is an attack where hackers intercept internet traffic flowing from one device to another over a network. 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.

      • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        For me it’s not really about the data, it’s unforseen malicious maneuvers outside data. Sabotaging instances, manipulating feeds for their gain, or try to still centralize the fediverse undermining the whole concept. My point is, we don’t know what bad thing they could/would do, they are creative. But we sure as fuck know it’s an evil organization and they can’t be trusted.

        • nuzzlerat@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          that’s fair. I fully believe they could pull some fuckery that would make everything worse

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Please tell me what governing body exists for the fediverse that would let us deny them access?

      • ieatpillowtags@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        How is this a relevant question? Nobody said anything about some governing body. There have been discussions on many instances about whether to federate with them or not, and it’s accurate to say that some people think we should.

        • Pips@lemmy.sdf.org
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          7 months ago

          For example, I’m personally of the opinion that instances should be allowed to federate until they prove themselves to be bad actors, but in Meta’s case there’s a lot of existing evidence that shows they shouldn’t be allowed to federate in the first instance.

          • JoBo@feddit.uk
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            7 months ago

            Who do you imagine is (or should be) making these rules for the Fediverse?

            • Pips@lemmy.sdf.org
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              7 months ago

              Every instance gets to decide on its own, there’s no set of rules governing the whole thing. That’s why I stated this is my opinion, not some hard and fast rule.

              • JoBo@feddit.uk
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                7 months ago

                You stated it very much as a set of rules that should exist. Twice.

        • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          its also accurate to say some people are fucking idiots and think we should federate.

          on the wax winged hope in hell that the bad actor suddenly, miraculously, becomes a good actor…for reasons no one can explain.

      • QuandaleDingle@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Do you know how the Fediverse works? Instance maintainers who are less than thrilled with Meta can choose to defederate from Threads.

        • ramble81@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          Exactly my point. It’d be on an instance by instance basis, there is no “singular group” that can block them from the entire fediverse.

      • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Im more specifically thinking about the big ones when this debate was going on about a couple of months ago.

      • leanleft@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        Diaspora allows for whitelisting visibility of posts to certain users(and servers… depending on where users are hosted)