Meta sues “scraping-for-hire” service that sells user data to law enforcement

Meta stated it’s suing “scraping-for-hire” service Voyager Labs for allegedly utilizing pretend accounts, proprietary software program, and a sprawling community of IP addresses to surreptitiously accumulate large quantities of private data from customers of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and different social networking websites.

“Defendant created and used over 38,000 fake Facebook user accounts and its Surveillance Software to scrape more than 600,000 Facebook users’ viewable profile information, including posts, likes, friends lists, photos, and comments, and information from Facebook Groups and Pages,” legal professionals wrote in Meta’s criticism. “Defendant designed the Surveillance Software to conceal its presence and activity from Meta and others, and sold and licensed for profit the data it scraped.”

“Bringing individuality to light”

Among the California-based Facebook customers to have their data scraped, Meta stated, have been “employees of nonprofit organizations, universities, news media organizations, health care facilities, the armed forces of the United States, and local, state, and federal government agencies, as well as full-time parents, retirees, and union members.” Meta stated the data assortment and use of pretend accounts violate its phrases of service.

Israel-headquartered Voyager Labs payments itself as an “AI-powered investigations” service that collects data from “billions of ‘human pixels’ and signals” and makes use of synthetic intelligence to map relationships, monitor geographic places, and supply different private data to “agencies tasked with public safety.”

“By leveraging this vast ocean of data, they can gain actionable insights on individuals, groups, and topics, and then deep dive to uncover even more,” firm officers wrote in advertising and marketing materials hooked up as displays to the Meta criticism. The tagline on Voyager Labs’ letterhead is: “Bringing individuality to light.”

In one case, the service used Facebook posts to establish the complete names of an Italian marathon runner and his spouse who had been contaminated with COVID-19. The service then offered a listing of the buddies and people who had interacted with the runner. In a special case, Voyager Labs recognized patrons of a UK pub who could have contracted the lethal virus.

Among Voyager Labs’ clients, in accordance to the displays, is the Los Angeles Police Department. A testimonial offered by one division member stated Voyager Labs was “Able to identify a few new targets in a much easier to read format” and was “able to process warrants returns much faster which were much easier to read.”

Images from a number of the displays are within the gallery beneath:

Meta seeks a everlasting injunction that would bar Voyager Labs from persevering with the observe.

In the lawsuit’s announcement, Meta Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation Jessica Romero wrote:

Voyager developed and used proprietary software program to launch scraping campaigns towards Facebook and Instagram, and web sites similar to Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Telegram. Voyager designed its scraping software program to use pretend accounts to scrape data accessible to a user when logged into Facebook, together with customers profile data, posts, mates lists, images and feedback. Voyager used a various system of computer systems and networks in numerous international locations to disguise its exercise, together with when Meta subjected the pretend accounts to verifications or checks. Voyager didn’t compromise Facebook, as an alternative it used pretend accounts to scrape publicly viewable data.

Our lawsuit alleges that Voyager has violated our Terms of Service towards pretend accounts and unauthorized and automatic scraping. We are in search of a everlasting injunction towards Voyager to defend individuals towards scraping-for-hire companies. Companies like Voyager are a part of an trade that supplies scraping companies to anybody whatever the customers they aim and for what goal, together with as a method to profile individuals for felony conduct. This trade covertly collects data that individuals share with their neighborhood, household and mates, with out oversight or accountability, and in a method that could implicate individuals’s civil rights.

Representatives of Voyager Labs didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

The lawsuit is at the very least the second time Meta has taken authorized motion for alleged data scraping on its platform. In July, the corporate sued Octopus, a US subsidiary of a Chinese nationwide high-tech enterprise that allegedly affords to scrape any web site, and sued Turkish-based particular person, defendant Ekrem Ateş, for allegedly utilizing Instagram accounts to scrape data from the profiles of greater than 350,000 customers of that platform.

Not that Meta has utterly clear palms when it comes to undesirable scraping. In 2018, a number of Facebook customers who had opted in to contact sharing have been distressed to discover the corporate had collected years’ price of cellphone name metadata from their Android telephones. The data included names, cellphone numbers, and the size of every name made or obtained. Facebook denied the data was collected surreptitiously.