Facebook has sued a Turkish developer for operating a network of at least 20 Instagram clone sites .
According to court documents seen by ZDNet, Facebook alleges that defendant Ensar Sahinturk, a software developer based in Istanbul, used software to harvest data from more than 100,000 Instagram profiles, which he later republished on his own sites.
According to Facebook, Sahinturk operated at least 20 Instagram clone sites, which contained photos from Instagram and displayed ads for profit.
Some of the domains managed by Sahinturk are: jolygram.com, imggram.com, imggram.net, finalgram.com, pikdo.net and ingram.ws.
The first domains were created in August 2017 and many of the sites are still operational.
Facebook said it tried to avoid legal action by sending multiple warning letters to the Turkish developer. However, Sahinturk did not respond.
According to court documents, Facebook said Sahinturk initially denied operating the Instagram clone sites. He later confessed and took down some of them, but then brought them back a few months later and stopped responding to Facebook's letters.
Facebook is asking the court to give it control of the domains. It is also asking for the Turkish developer to be punished by returning all profits he made from managing the Instagram clone sites.
In addition to the apparent violation of Instagram's terms of service and trademarks, Facebook claims that the developer caused harm to users Instagram Essentially, Facebook is accusing the Turkish developer of ' privacy users, as much of their data was leaked online and visible to other people who don't even have Instagram. The data exposed includes images, videos, stories, hashtags, and locations.
Facebook said it had already banned Sahinturk's Facebook developer account , as well as about 30,000 Instagram profiles, which were used to collect data and were linked to the 20 clone sites.
Source: ZDNet
