Meta continued to take actions against data scraping on its platforms, this time setting its sights on Voyager Labs.
The company filed a legal action against Voyager Labs in federal court in California, seeking to ban it from Facebook and Instagram for creating fake accounts and scraping user data.
Meta disabled Voyager Labs’ accounts and filed the court action with the aim of permanently banning it for violations of its terms of service.
Director of platform enforcement and litigation Jessica Romero explained in a Newsroom post Thursday, “Voyager developed and used proprietary software to launch scraping campaigns against Facebook and Instagram, and websites such as Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Telegram. Voyager designed its scraping software to use fake accounts to scrape data accessible to a user when logged into Facebook, including users’ profile information, posts, friends lists, photos and comments. Voyager used a diverse system of computers and networks in different countries to hide its activity, including when Meta subjected the fake accounts to verifications or checks. Voyager did not compromise Facebook—instead, it used fake accounts to scrape publicly viewable information.”
She added, “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. This industry covertly collects information that people share with their community, family and friends, without oversight or accountability, and in a way that may implicate people’s civil rights.”
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