Meta is taking the law into its own hands. Well, more like it’s launching legal action against yet another company for scraping profile data from both Facebook and Instagram in its pursuit of establishing a legal precedent to stamp out data misuse.
As per Meta:
“Today, Meta has filed legal action against Voyager Labs in the federal court in California. Voyager Labs is a scraping and surveillance service that improperly collected data from Facebook, Instagram, and other websites. We disabled Voyager’s accounts, filed this action to enforce our Terms and Policies, and asked the Court to ban Voyager from Facebook and Instagram.”
Getting in a Scrap
Meta alleges that Voyager Labs used proprietary software to launch scraping campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Telegram. Meta adds on:
“Voyager designed its scraping software to use fake accounts to scrape data accessible to a user when logged into Facebook, including users’ profile information, posts, friends’ lists, photos, and comments. Voyager used a diverse system of computers and networks in different countries to hide its activity, including when Meta subjected the fake accounts to verifications or checks. Voyager did not compromise Facebook, instead it used fake accounts to scrape publicly viewable information.”
The question of the legality around scraping publicly accessible sites has been debated for ages, with LinkedIn battling for years to stop a certain company from using its publicly available user information to fuel its own service. On that note, LinkedIn first launched its legal campaign against hiQ Labs in 2017, after discovering that it had been harvesting LinkedIn user data to build its own recruitment information service. The case went back and forth since, with some readings of the law even suggesting that such action isn’t in violation of any specific terms, though in November of last year, the courts ruled in favor of LinkedIn, which Meta now hopes to also achieve.
It’ll be interesting to see whether Meta can use LinkedIn’s case as a precedent, which could make it much clearer as to how platforms can prevent data scraping in the future. It’s the latest in a range of legal actions launched by Meta over the last couple of years, in an attempt to push for updates to current laws and regulations as they specifically pertain to Social Media.
The Wrap
Meta also launched legal action against two companies for data scraping last July. At the same time, it has also added a data scraping section into its Bug Bounty program, rewarding developers for highlighting platform misuse. True enough, it does seem that this heightened push from Meta is having an impact, which could ensure that scrapers have a much more difficult time operating, moving forward.
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