Meta continued to take actions in opposition to information scraping on its platforms, this time setting its sights on Voyager Labs.
The corporate filed a authorized motion in opposition to Voyager Labs in federal court docket in California, searching for to ban it from Fb and Instagram for creating pretend accounts and scraping person information.
Meta disabled Voyager Labs’ accounts and filed the court docket motion with the goal of completely banning it for violations of its phrases of service.
Director of platform enforcement and litigation Jessica Romero defined in a Newsroom put up Thursday, “Voyager developed and used proprietary software program to launch scraping campaigns in opposition to Fb and Instagram, and web sites comparable to Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Telegram. Voyager designed its scraping software program to make use of pretend accounts to scrape information accessible to a person when logged into Fb, together with customers’ profile data, posts, buddies lists, images and feedback. Voyager used a various system of computer systems and networks in numerous international locations to cover its exercise, together with when Meta subjected the pretend accounts to verifications or checks. Voyager didn’t compromise Fb—as an alternative, it used pretend accounts to scrape publicly viewable data.”
She added, “Firms like Voyager are a part of an trade that gives scraping companies to anybody whatever the customers they aim and for what function, together with as a method to profile folks for felony habits. This trade covertly collects data that folks share with their group, household and buddies, with out oversight or accountability, and in a approach which will implicate folks’s civil rights.”
