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When you think of Meta and its Facebook platform, “They sure do care about my data” is not often what comes to mind. However that is exactly the motivation behind a recent court action begun by the company.
Meta announced last week that it was taking legal action against Voyager Labs. It has disabled the company’s Facebook page and is hoping a Californian federal court will ban the company entirely from Facebook and Instagram.
Voyager Labs markets itself as an expert in “AI-based investigation solutions”.
“Government and law enforcement agencies, as well as private sector customers, use our award-winning, cutting-edge technology and superior domain expertise to exponentially increase the productivity and outcomes of their investigative teams, empowering them to mitigate risks and make the world a safer place,” the company claims on its website.
Meta, however, argues that the company uses its scraping software alongside fake accounts to harvest data such as user profiles, friend lists, and more. Voyager hides its data scraping operations via networks in different countries, Facebook alleges, and scrapes data from its own properties as well as sites like LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter.
While such information is publicly available, Meta’s case claims Voyager’s operations violate its terms of service.
“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 behaviour,” Meta states. “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.”
In July 2022, Meta took action against Octopus, a similar scraping service, and against Turkish citizen Ekrem Ateş for scraping data from over 350,000 Instagram accounts — Ateş has been targeted by Facebook multiple times since February 2021.
While Meta may be bullish about how seriously it takes protecting its users’ data, the company has come under fire over how it in turn uses that data.
Earlier this month, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission hit the company with two fines relating to breaches of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Meta was subsequently directed to clean up its act in Europe within a three-month time frame, though the company is strenuously appealing the ruling.
“We strongly believe our approach respects GDPR,” Meta said at the time. “The debate around legal bases has been ongoing for some time and businesses have faced a lack of regulatory certainty in this area.”
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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