The unsealed court documents (PDF) have revealed Facebook‘s top-secret “Project Ghostbusters.” This covert operation was initiated by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to spy on the user data of rival social media platform Snapchat. The revelation is quite stunning and sheds light on Facebook’s unethical practices.

The seeds of this espionage campaign were sown in 2016 when Zuckerberg grew increasingly frustrated with Snapchat’s privacy measures, which hindered Facebook’s ability to gather analytics on its competitor’s operations. In a June 9, 2016, email to company executives, the CEO expressed his exasperation, stating, “Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them.”

Zuckerberg’s directive was clear: “Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.”

Javier Olivan, Facebook’s current Chief Operating Officer, echoed Zuckerberg’s sentiment, replying, “Fully agree that this was one of the most important market analysis questions we need to answer.”

Facebook’s solution to this conundrum was the Onavo Virtual Private Network (VPN), a tool acquired from an Israeli firm in 2013. Owning Onavo allowed the company to monitor rival apps by “intercepting and decrypting” network traffic sent between the apps and their servers, as revealed in the court documents.

Following Zuckerberg’s email, Onavo engineers developed kits to carry out “man-in-the-middle” monitoring, enabling them to “read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic.” This spying technique, which provided the ability to “measure detailed in-app activity,” was subsequently employed on other platforms like Amazon and YouTube.

The newly unsealed court documents stem from a class-action lawsuit in California brought by consumers against Facebook’s parent company, Meta. According to the prosecuting lawyers, “the intended and actual result of this program was to harm competition, including Facebook’s then-nascent Social Advertising competitor Snapchat.”