Meta is suing Voyager Labs for creating fake profiles and scraping thousands of Facebook user accounts.
Meta has filed a lawsuit against Voyager Labs for creating tens of thousands of fake accounts to harvest personal data from more than 600,000 Facebook user profiles . According to Meta , the monitoring company had access to posts, likes, friend lists, as well as photos and comments from groups/pages by hiding their activity using monitoring software. In addition, it is alleged that the company also collected information from Instagram , Twitter , YouTube , LinkedIn and Telegram in order to generate revenue through licensing or sales.
In a statement to Gizmodo, Meta asked the judge to permanently ban Voyager from Facebook and Instagram. The court filing states that “ Meta has suffered irreparable harm for which there is no substitute at law.” It also claims that Voyager have prompted damages such as investigation costs — the amount of which will be revealed during the trial process.
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According to Meta, Voyager illegally collected data from accounts belonging to people including employees of nonprofits, universities, and news organizations, as well as full-time parents, retirees, and union members. The company has disabled all connected accounts associated with Voyager and filed a lawsuit to enforce its terms and policies.
Jessica Romero , Meta ’s director of platform enforcement and litigation, warns that companies like Voyager are part of an industry with little to no oversight or accountability, using scraping services to access information shared by people – including their family and friends – without their knowledge or consent, potentially violating their civil rights.
In 2021, The Guardian revealed that the Los Angeles Police Department experimented with Voyager 's social media monitoring technology in 2019. According to the company, law enforcement could use this program to track a suspect's associates on the respective platforms and potentially predict criminal activity before it happens by analyzing an individual's behavior.
The Guardian recently reported that Voyager suggested using Instagram usernames and tweets about Islam to identify potential extremists. To make matters worse, Palantir has also been involved in developing predictive policing technology. However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation strongly disputes this idea, arguing that the algorithms simply reflect existing biases and do not accurately predict criminal behavior.
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Meta had to deal with data scraping in 2021, when it went after an individual for scraping data from 178 million users. For its failure to prevent malicious actors from gaining access to millions of people’s phone numbers and other personal information, which was then leaked online, Meta was fined a hefty €265 million ($277 million). The DPC further added that Meta completely ignored GDPR regulations .
This isn’t the first time Meta has sued a spyware company over its use of its platform. It is currently embroiled in a long-running legal battle with Israel-based NSO Group over allegations that it exploited a vulnerability in WhatsApp to infect 1,400 phones with the highly potent “Pegasus”. The organization behind the malware has been denounced as “21st century mercenaries” who allegedly provide programs to intelligence agencies that then use them against journalists, human rights activists, children, and politicians.
Meta ’s lawsuit was a huge success this week, as the Supreme Court rejected NSO ’s attempt to have it dismissed. Meta accused NSO of violating various laws — including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — by accessing WhatsApp users’ devices without permission. Apple followed suit in 2021, launching its own court case against NSO.
Source: engadget.com
