Summary of the meta demand:
- Who: Meta Platforms Inc. sued artificial intelligence company Voyager Labs Ltd.
- Why: Voyager allegedly created fake Facebook accounts to illicitly scrape and sell other users’ data.
- Where: The Meta lawsuit was filed in California federal court.
Meta Platforms Inc. filed a data scraping lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Voyager Labs Ltd. over claims Voyager sells Facebook users’ data to its clients.
The Meta lawsuit alleges Voyager created more than 38,000 fake Facebook accounts and utilized unauthorized means to “scrape” data from more than 600,000 Facebook users.
“Scraping is a form of data collection that relies on unauthorized automation for the purpose of extracting data from a website or app,” the Meta lawsuit explains.
data for profit, according
The AI company reportedly marketed the scraping software to clients seeking to conduct secret surveillance on social media sites. The Meta lawsuit states that Voyager’s marketing materials tout that its “unique collection methods enable traceless collection from social media networks.”
other users’ data, the
had no friends, no
and California law, Meta
social media sites, including
Meta provides Facebook and Instagram users with the ability to control the information they share in their profiles and how much information is viewable to others. Users can change their privacy settings at any time.
and Instagram accounts, Facebook
Instagram without permission, Meta
Voyager since 2017, including
Meta recently won $365,000 from Hong Kong social media company Social Data Trading Ltd. in a similar lawsuit accusing the company of illicitly scraping data from users’ profiles.
What do you think about the allegations in the data scraping lawsuit? Join the discussion in the comments.
by Kalpana Srininvasan, Oleg
Voyager Labs Ltd., Case
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