Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook execs to 'figure out' how to track encrypted usage on rival apps like Snap and YouTube, unsealed documents show
Newly unsealed emails reveal that when Meta was still called Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his executives to find a way to learn how people were using competing apps like Snapchat, even if the information was encrypted.
Zuckerberg wrote in a June 2016 email to Javier Olivan, who was then Facebook's head of growth, that he wanted a better answer to questions about Snapchat's usage and growth than "because their analytics are encrypted we have no analytics about them." At the time, Snapchat was still a private company with strong user growth.
The correspondence was made public last week as part of ongoing litigation in a California federal court, in which Meta is accused of anticompetitive behavior in the social-media ads market.
Two months after the email was sent, Facebook launched Instagram Stories, where users could post pictures and videos that would disappear after 24 hours — a feature pioneered by Snapchat. Stories has since become one of Instagram's most successful developments.
"Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg said about Snapchat in the email to Olivan. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this," he wrote.
