No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

Facebook in 2013 acquired a tool called Onavo. The acquisition generated little buzz, as it wasn’t a flashy consumer product. It was a wonky-sounding thing called a virtual private network, or VPN, which was made by Israeli engineers to allow people to be able to browse the Internet free from government spying on their activity, and from having to go through firewalls. For Facebook, the acquisition was crucial. While people were escaping the watchful eye of their governments, they were unwittingly giving Facebook competitive intelligence. Once Facebook purchased the VPN company, they could look at all the traffic flowing through the service and extrapolate data from it. They knew not only the names of the apps people were playing with, but also how long they spent using them, and the names of the app screens they spent time on—and so, for example, could know if Snapchat Stories was taking off versus some other Snapchat feature. It helped them see which competitors were on the rise before the press did. The data was easily accessible to Facebook employees, and was funneled into regular reports for executives and the growth team so that everyone could keep tabs on the competition.

Zuckerberg launched an initiative to add more people to the internet, all of whom could be potential future Facebook users. He started a division of Facebook called Internet.org, which sounded like it was a nonprofit; it would be charged with figuring out how to bring connectivity to remote areas of the world, using drones, lasers, and whatever else its team could come up with.

Facebook executives talked among themselves about how ungrateful the WhatsApp founders had been. The consensus was that the team had always been high maintenance, asking for slightly bigger desks, longer bathroom doors that reached all the way to the floor, and conference rooms that were off-limits to other Facebook employees.

Wanting longer bathroom doors is considered high-maintenance? There's probably some irony there regarding privacy. Also makes me think about Americentrism (although WhatsApp is American too, short doors are mainly an American thing, yet no one seems to have problems with getting espresso machines in these companies even though Drip coffee is common method).