Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zuckerberg personally ok'ed wiretapping both Amazon and YouTube [pdf]

storage.courtlistener.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 26 posts

Re: Zuckerberg personally ok'ed wiretapping both Amazon and YouTube [pdf]

#4

Post by sp332 »

andthenzen wrote: post #3

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.

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

Re: Zuckerberg personally ok'ed wiretapping both Amazon and YouTube [pdf]

#6

Post by dec0dedab0de »

andthenzen wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Zuckerberg personally ok'ed wiretapping both Amazon and YouTube [pdf]

#7

Post by andthenzen »

sp332 wrote: post #4
andthenzen wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Zuckerberg personally ok'ed wiretapping both Amazon and YouTube [pdf]

#8

Post by dang »

andthenzen wrote: post #3

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.

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...

Re: Zuckerberg personally ok'ed wiretapping both Amazon and YouTube [pdf]

#9

Post by jitl »

“Wiretap” without additional context is a bit misleading since in conjures an image of listening to phone conversations between employees of the competitor. I think it may be fair to call it wiretapping but it’s different from that image.

They paid users to install an app on smartphones that spied on network requests made by those users. In iPhone this app used OS VPN support to intercept traffic, and a root CA certificate to treat the intercepted connection as legitimate.

“Proxyman” is an iOS app that does the same thing on behalf of the user - it’s super helpful for debugging your own app or reverse engineering someone else’s app. I used it to reverse engineer the API of my smart home gym app Tempo Fitness so I could build my own dashboards from my workout metrics.

Facebook used this technique to “wiretap” the analytics log events that Snap and the other apps were sending to themselves - events probably look like “user swiped to next video after viewing video id=1234 for 3 seconds” or “user clicked ad id=5678”.

TechCrunch report on Facebook Research (2019): https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/?gu...

The Wikipedia page for Onavo (the startup Facebook bought that that powered this stuff) is pretty clear and has good citations for additional reading:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo

Re: Zuckerberg personally ok'ed wiretapping both Amazon and YouTube [pdf]

#10

Post by dec0dedab0de »

jitl wrote: post #9

“Wiretap” without additional context is a bit misleading since in conjures an image of listening to phone conversations between employees of the competitor. I think it may be fair to call it wiretapping but it’s different from that image. They paid users to install an app on smartphones that spied on network requests made by those users. In iPhone this app used OS VPN support to intercept traffic, and a root CA certi…

I think Wiretap is a fair analogy for intercepting and decrypting traffic for other apps.
Post reply on HN