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Comment by andthenzen | Hacker News Reader

Where is this headline coming from? I haven't been following this case, and unfortunately, either my poor legal or technical comprehension prevents me from finding the points in this brief which substantiate the submission title.

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Yes, it looks like this title was badly editorialized. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

Submitters: if you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

YouTube is mentioned a couple of times on page 2 where Zuckerberg is informed of the specifics of the program.

Thanks! I assume it's referencing this sentence and surrounding info: > "Dozens of documents from across the company reveal that Zuckerberg had spoken to the company’s head of security, its then-CTO, and others about the risks and rewards of the IAAP program—which involved the interception and decryption of secure analytics traffic from Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon for competitive reasons—and would personally make a decision about whether to continue it."

I'm not sure where it jumps to "wiretapping" (just from a layperson's standpoint). The image I had in my head was Meta tapping the phones or devices of Amazon and Youtube employees which was probably a silly interpretation of the title.

The headlines around this have definitely blown things up. Running a VPN service so you can snoop on how customers use other services is plenty scummy, no need for the catastrophising.

Running a VPN service would not be wiretapping, but that is not what they were doing, and understand they had multiple avenues that they explored.

If you want to focus on just the VPN bit though; running a VPN would not break Amazon's secure communication. For Facebook/Meta to accomplish what they did they had to place fake endpoints in-between Amazon and its customers where they could pretend to be the party Amazon thought it was communicating with.

The VPN app installed a root CA on the device and did the snooping locally. It collected statistics about how people used competitors' services and sent that info back to Facebook.

How would Meta/Facebook accomplished this without reading Amazon's communication with its customers?

You have at least two parties in any conversation, I don't see where Youtube or Amazon consented, nevertheless, the recording was being done by Meta/Facebook, which was a third-party to the communication.

There are both Federal and State laws against the sort of wire-tapping that Facebook/Meta performed.

Again, the users installed this app on their own devices. You don't need permission from Youtube to install that kind of thing on your phone. Many, many companies install software like this on company-owned computers and phones so they can tap all internet communications on the internal network and watch for malware or data leaks. It's very common.

Dozens of documents from across the company reveal that Zuckerberg had spoken to the company’s head of security, its then-CTO, and others about the risks and rewards of the IAAP program—which involved the interception and decryption of secure analytics traffic from Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon for competitive reasons—and would personally make a decision about whether to continue it

It seems as though none of these people got a reply email, even though they all were looking for his response.

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