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by brianaker 813 days ago
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.
1 comments
sp332 813 days ago
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.
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brianaker 813 days ago
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.

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sp332 813 days ago
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.
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