Meta sues surveillance company for allegedly deleting over 600,000 accounts
It says Voyager Labs used over 38,000 fake Facebook user accounts to collect data from profiles, groups and pages.
Meta has filed a lawsuit against Voyager Labs, which it accuses of creating tens of thousands of fake accounts to harvest data from more than 600,000 Facebook user profiles. It says the monitoring company pulled information such as posts, likes, friend lists, photos and comments, as well as other group and page details. Meta claims that Voyager masked its activity using its surveillance software and that the company also mined data from Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Telegram to sell and license it for profit.
In the suit, which was obtained by Gizmodo, Meta asked a judge to permanently ban Voyager from Facebook and Instagram. "As a direct result of defendant's unlawful actions, Meta has suffered and continues to suffer irreparable harm for which there is no adequate remedy at law, and which will continue unless defendant's actions are ordered," reads the folder. Meta said Voyager's actions caused him to "incur damages, including investigative costs, in an amount to be proven at trial".
Meta claims that Voyager extracted data from accounts belonging to "employees of non-profit organizations, universities, news organizations, healthcare facilities, the United States Armed Forces, and from local, state, and federal government agencies, as well as full-time, retired, and union-member parents." The company noted in a blog post that it had disabled accounts linked to Voyager and had taken legal action to enforce its terms and policies.
"Companies like Voyager are part of an industry that provides scraping services to anyone, no matter what users they target and for what purpose, including as a way to profile people for a criminal behavior,” Jessica Romero, Director of Platforms Enforcement at Meta and Litigation, wrote. "This industry secretly collects information that people share with their community, family, and friends, without oversight or accountability, and in ways that may implicate people's civil rights."
In 2021, The Guardian reported that the Los Angeles Police Department tested Voyager's social media monitoring tools in 2019. The company reportedly told the department that police could use the software to track a suspect's friends' social media accounts, and that the system could predict crimes before they happened by making assumptions about a person's activity.
>According to The Guardian, Voyager suggested that factors such as Instagram usernames denoting Arab pride or tweets about Islam could indicate someone leans towards extremism . Other companies, such as Palantir, have worked on predictive policing technology. Critics like the Electronic Frontier Foundation claim that technology cannot predict crime and that algorithms only
It says Voyager Labs used over 38,000 fake Facebook user accounts to collect data from profiles, groups and pages.
Meta has filed a lawsuit against Voyager Labs, which it accuses of creating tens of thousands of fake accounts to harvest data from more than 600,000 Facebook user profiles. It says the monitoring company pulled information such as posts, likes, friend lists, photos and comments, as well as other group and page details. Meta claims that Voyager masked its activity using its surveillance software and that the company also mined data from Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Telegram to sell and license it for profit.
In the suit, which was obtained by Gizmodo, Meta asked a judge to permanently ban Voyager from Facebook and Instagram. "As a direct result of defendant's unlawful actions, Meta has suffered and continues to suffer irreparable harm for which there is no adequate remedy at law, and which will continue unless defendant's actions are ordered," reads the folder. Meta said Voyager's actions caused him to "incur damages, including investigative costs, in an amount to be proven at trial".
Meta claims that Voyager extracted data from accounts belonging to "employees of non-profit organizations, universities, news organizations, healthcare facilities, the United States Armed Forces, and from local, state, and federal government agencies, as well as full-time, retired, and union-member parents." The company noted in a blog post that it had disabled accounts linked to Voyager and had taken legal action to enforce its terms and policies.
"Companies like Voyager are part of an industry that provides scraping services to anyone, no matter what users they target and for what purpose, including as a way to profile people for a criminal behavior,” Jessica Romero, Director of Platforms Enforcement at Meta and Litigation, wrote. "This industry secretly collects information that people share with their community, family, and friends, without oversight or accountability, and in ways that may implicate people's civil rights."
In 2021, The Guardian reported that the Los Angeles Police Department tested Voyager's social media monitoring tools in 2019. The company reportedly told the department that police could use the software to track a suspect's friends' social media accounts, and that the system could predict crimes before they happened by making assumptions about a person's activity.
>According to The Guardian, Voyager suggested that factors such as Instagram usernames denoting Arab pride or tweets about Islam could indicate someone leans towards extremism . Other companies, such as Palantir, have worked on predictive policing technology. Critics like the Electronic Frontier Foundation claim that technology cannot predict crime and that algorithms only
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