Meta (formerly Facebook) sued a company that allegedly extracted data from more than 600,000 Facebook profiles and sold this information to companies promising extensive surveillance of the social networking data of people considered “potential targets”, referring to advertising interests.
According to information, the company accused of practicing data scraping is the startup Voyager Lab, based in the United Kingdom, which appears to have created fake accounts to collect information from real individuals not just from Facebook, but Instagram, Twitter and YouTube feeding their investigation software.
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22 Dec
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19 Dec
As stated in the case file, Meta verified the creation of 38,000 false accounts supposedly made by Voyager Labs resulting in the data scraping of 60,000 profiles. Among the contents collected are publications likes, list of friends, photos and comments posted on the social network and more.
According to Meta, Voyager Labs was notified on November 11, 2022 with a request from the company to immediately end data scraping, but it is unknown if the request was granted. This practice violates the terms of use of the social network that restricts third parties from extracting information from Facebook and Instagram users.
“Companies like Voyager are part of an industry that provides scraping services to anyone, regardless of the users they target and for what purpose, including as a way to profile people for criminal behavior,” Meta said in a statement. communicated.
This is not the first time that Mark Zuckerberg’s company has actively acted to curb data scraping on its platforms, since a few months ago another company was also fined for violating Instagram’s terms of use.
Developer: Facebook
Free – offers in-app purchases
Size: Varies by device
Do you use any of Meta’s social networks? Did you know about data scraping? Tell us, comment!
