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.