Meta has filed a lawsuit against a social media spying firm that allegedly obtained the data of 600,000 Facebook and Instagram users.
The social media giant says the company, known as Voyager Labs, used more than 38,000 fake accounts to collect user information including social-media posts, friends’ lists, photos, and comments.
Meta says it has disabled the bogus accounts, and is asking a judge to permanently ban Voyager from using its services.
The lawsuit is the latest salvo against a process known as data scraping, which sees companies or individuals using software to extract large troves of publicly available info from online sources.
This can range from harmless methods, like price-comparison services scouring shopping sites for pricing info on the latest products, to more dubious practises, including the harvesting and sale of social-media user data using bots.
Meta has fallen victim to data scraping on multiple occasions. In 2021, the personal data of more than 533 million Facebook users - including phone numbers and locations - was published on a hacking forum. The incident led Irish regulators to fine Meta €265 million (£230m) for failing to safeguard user info.
Last year, Meta filed two legal complaints against data scrapers including a Chinese-owned scraping-for-hire company, and a Turkish individual who allegedly collected info on over 350,000 Instagram users for a copycat website.
Meta’s terms of service forbid the creation of fake accounts and unauthorised and automated scraping. The company, which owns Instagram and Facebook, vowed to crack down on mass data-scraping after Cambridge Analytica harvested the data of more than 80 million users to target voters with political ads in the 2016 US election.
In its latest legal filing, Meta alleges that Voyager used a “diverse system of computers and networks” to hide its data-scraping activity, including when Meta was checking the validity of the fake accounts.
Adding to the privacy concerns, a previous report in The Guardian revealed that the Los Angeles police department was trialing Voyager’s social-media surveillance software. The company reportedly pitched its artificial intelligence to law enforcers as being able to discern people’s motives and identify who was likely to commit a future crime.
