Onavo
Israeli VPN and app-analytics start-up founded by Unit 8200 veterans; bought by Facebook in 2013 and used to monitor rivals
| Onavo
| |
|---|---|
| Type | Subsidiary of Facebook (2013–2019); app shut down 2019 |
| Founded | 2009 (app) |
| Founder(s) | Guy Rosen, Roi Tiger |
| Headquarters | Tel Aviv, Israel |
| Industry | Mobile data / VPN / app analytics |
| Parent | Facebook (from 2013) |
Onavo was an Israeli mobile-data start-up whose app was later sold as a virtual private network (VPN). Its founders, Guy Rosen and Roi Tiger, met during their service in Unit 8200.[1] Facebook bought Onavo in 2013, and a UK parliamentary committee later reported that Facebook had used the app to gather data on rival apps.[2][3]
Founders and Unit 8200
Ynetnews reported in 2014 that Guy Rosen met Roi Tiger "during their military service in the 8200 unit" (Unit 8200), and that in 2009 the two "set up the Onavo application". By then both had joined Facebook, Rosen as a product manager for internet.org and Tiger as director of Facebook development in Israel, after Facebook "acquired their start-up, Onavo".[1]
Use by Facebook to monitor competitors
In February 2019 the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee reported that Facebook used Onavo, "which was billed as a way to give users an extra layer of security", to "collect app usage data from its customers to assess not only how many people had downloaded apps, but how often they used them". According to the BBC, the committee said: "This knowledge helped them to decide which companies were performing well and therefore gave them invaluable data on possible competitors."[2]
In March 2024 TechCrunch reported, from documents unsealed in a US consumer class action against Meta, that Facebook's "Project Ghostbusters" had aimed to intercept and decrypt traffic between Snapchat users and Snapchat's servers, and that Facebook's engineers had turned to Onavo, "a VPN-like service that Facebook acquired in 2013", to do so. An internal email described the method as "a 'man-in-the-middle' approach". TechCrunch added that Facebook shut Onavo down in 2019 after a TechCrunch investigation revealed that Facebook had been "secretly paying teenagers to use Onavo so the company could access all of their web activity".[3]