Leaked documents suggest Facebook accessed user data from rival platforms

Newly unsealed court documents indicate that Facebook secretly analysed user data from competing platforms to better understand how people behaved outside its own services. 

The records were released by a federal court in California as part of an ongoing class action lawsuit involving Meta and a group of consumers.

According to the documents, Facebook launched a covert internal effort to study traffic patterns and analytics from rival platforms. 

The project initially focused on Snapchat before expanding to major platforms such as Amazon and YouTube.

The filings were submitted by attorney Brian J. Dunne and reviewed by US District Judge James Donato. 

They are part of a lawsuit filed in 2020 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, which accuses Facebook of anticompetitive conduct and deceptive methods to obtain user data.

The documents describe an initiative known internally as “Project Ghostbusters,” a name referencing Snapchat’s logo. 

The project operated under Facebook’s In-App Action Panel program between 2016 and 2019 and was reportedly launched at the direct request of CEO Mark Zuckerberg.