Mark Zuckerberg told Meta executives to ‘figure out’ how to crack encrypted Snapchat data: court docs

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg once pressed executives to “figure out” how to obtain encrypted data from rival Snapchat in order to gain a leg up in the advertising market, according to unsealed court documents.

Zuckerberg gave the directive in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan, who formerly served as Facebook’s head of growth and has since become Meta’s chief operating officer, and two other executives.

At the time, Facebook was facing fierce competition from a rising Snapchat, which had yet to go public and was experiencing rapid user growth.

“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them,” Zuckerberg wrote in the email.

“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,” he added.

The email surfaced this week as part of a class-action lawsuit underway in California federal court. Meta stands accused of deceiving users about its data collection practices as part of a broader anti-competitive effort to dominate the social media market.