- Meta Platforms, Inc (NASDAQ:META) prosecuted Octopus Data, the U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese national high-tech enterprise Shenzhen Vision Information Technology Co.
- Octopus Data allegedly offered data scraping services for Facebook and Instagram.
- Meta also prosecuted a Turkey-based individual, Ekrem Ateş, for allegedly setting up automated Instagram accounts to scrape data from 350,000 Instagram users.
- Also Read: Ireland Watchdog Initiates Facebook Probe After Data Leak Reports: Reuters
- Octopus allegedly charges its customers to access a software product called Octoparse to launch scraping attacks. Customers could also pay Octopus to scrape websites directly.
- Customers had to give access to their accounts, allowing the software to glean data usually only available to logged-in users, including Facebook friends, email addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, and Instagram followers.
- Octoparse is not limited to Meta's properties, either, with services offered across numerous sites, including Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR), Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) YouTube, Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT) LinkedIn.
- The case follows less than three months after a U.S. court reaffirmed an earlier ruling that web-scraping is legal, TechCrunch reports.
- The verdict followed a long-standing legal battle between LinkedIn and a data science company, Hiq Labs, which scraped personal information from LinkedIn to help its customers predict employee attrition.
- Previously, a Chinese software developer sifted Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's (NYSE: BABA) Taobao shopping website for eight months and secretly collected over 1.1 billion pieces of user information.
- Price Action: META shares traded lower by 0.36% at $167.58 in the premarket on the last check Wednesday.
- Photo by StockSnap from Pixabay
