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Facebook under the magnifying glass (symbol image): With its lawsuit, the parent company Meta wants to take action against companies that systematically skim data
Photo: Thomas Hodel / REUTERS
The UK-registered company Voyager Labs is said to have maintained 38,000 fake Facebook accounts in order to systematically skim data from the platform.
With a lawsuit filed on Thursday, the parent company Meta wants to fight the business of so-called "scrapers" such as Voyager Labs, which collect publicly visible information in social networks - for example likes, friend lists or photos - and want to recognize suspicions against users.
Meta says it has already identified and banned the Voyager Labs accounts on both Facebook and Instagram.
With the lawsuit filed in California, the group wants to enforce that the company with several international branches must stay away from the meta platforms in the future.
contracts with the police
Among other things, Meta relies on material from the Brennan Center For Justice and research by the British »Guardian«.
The Center had revealed through a series of inquiries to authorities that at least the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) had been using Voyager Labs' service for months to monitor and search for suspected criminal activity.
The company boasted that its surveillance left no traces.
It is not known who the company also works for.
Overall, she is said to have siphoned off the data from 600,000 Facebook accounts.
"This industry covertly collects information that people share with their communities, family and friends, without oversight or accountability and in ways that may affect people's civil rights," Meta executive Jessica Romero said in a statement.
The fact that the group is taking action against the data collectors and evaluators is also in its own interest, since supervisory authorities and legislators no longer want to tolerate unbridled data traffic.
In November 2022, the Irish Data Protection Authority fined Meta €265 million for offering data from more than half a billion Facebook users on hacker forums.
At the time, the group accused Scraper of having compiled the data set from publicly shared information, and that there was no security gap.
In July, Meta had already filed a lawsuit against two providers who are also said to have systematically siphoned off Facebook information.
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