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How did Facebook intercept competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic? (2024)


A technical investigation into information uncovered in a class action lawsuit that Facebook had intercepted encrypted traffic from user's devices running the Onavo Protect app in order to gain competitive insights.

The analysis made in this post is based on content court documents and reverse engineering sections of archived Onavo Protect app packages for Android. This type of information we can't obtain from looking at the archived Onavo Protect apps, rather for the time being, we have to rely on the content in the court documents made available to the public. While this is all "old news" in the sense that happened years ago, it is interesting from a technical standpoint to see how far application developers, and even companies like Facebook will go to abuse permission models on mobile phones.

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