Meta Sues a Social Media Spying Company That Scraped 600,000 Facebook and Instagram User Data

Meta accuses Voyager Labs of using fake accounts to dig up information from more than 600,000 Facebook users. (doc. Pixabay)

JAKARTA - A lawsuit was filed by Meta against the social media spy company, Voyager Labs. They are suspected of creating tens of thousands of fake Facebook accounts to scrape user data and provide surveillance services for clients.

Voyager Labs, allegedly used more than 38.000 fake accounts to gather user information including social media posts, friends lists, photos and comments.

Meta said Voyager Labs used the fake accounts to extract information from more than 600.000 Facebook users between July 2022 and September 2022.

By now, the company had deactivated more than 60.000 accounts, Facebook and Instagram pages associated with Voyager Labs on or around January 12.

Voyager Labs bills itself as a world leader in advanced AI-based investigative solutions. That means in practice, analyzing social media posts in bulk to make claims about individuals.

In its official blog quoted on Tuesday, January 17, Meta also asked the judge to permanently ban Voyager Labs from using its services such as Facebook and Instagram, as well as provide compensation for profits obtained illegally in an amount that will be proven at trial.

By claiming Voyager Labs unfairly enriched itself at Meta's expense. The lawsuit is the latest salvo against a process known as data scraping, in which companies or individuals use software to extract large amounts of publicly available information from online sources.

In the lawsuit, Meta accuses Voyager Labs of using various computer systems and networks to hide its data scraping activity, including when Meta checks the validity of fake accounts. The company also collects data from various sites including Twitter, YouTube and Telegram.

An earlier report from The Guardian revealed that the Los Angeles police department was testing social media surveillance software owned by Voyager Labs.

The company is reportedly offering its artificial intelligence to law enforcement because it is able to discern people's motives and identify who is likely to commit future crimes.

Meta Constantly Becomes Victim of Data Scraping

For your information, this is not the first time Meta has become a victim of data scraping. In 2021, personal data such as phone numbers and locations of more than 533 million Facebook users were published on hacking forums.

The incident cost the Irish regulator Meta 230 million euros, equivalent to IDR 3.7 trillion, for failing to protect users' personal information.

Last year, Meta filed two legal complaints against data scrapers including a Chinese-owned scraping-for-hire company, and a Turkish individual who allegedly collected information from more than 350.000 Instagram users for copycat sites.

Meta itself has rules on its service, which prohibit fake account creation, unauthorized auto-scraping. The company also vowed to crack down on mass data scraping after Cambridge Analytica collected data from more than 80 million users to target voters with political ads in the 2016 US election.