Meta sues the Chinese tech company’s US subsidiary for offering data-scraping services for Facebook and Instagram. Social network giant Facebook’s parent company, Meta, alleges that it set up an automated Instagram to perform data-scraping for almost 350,000 Instagram users.
In a case filed in the US District Court (Northern District of California), it is not a new thing when it comes to web-scrapers; there have been a massive number of automated tools available for Facebook and Instagram to gather data from websites.
“We are seeking a permanent injunction against Octopus,” said Meta.
Recently, web-scraping has been legal in the US, which comes after three months of US Court reaffirmation. Furthermore, it does not come under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). In the past, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn had a legal battle with HiQ Labs (a data science company). HiQ Labs uses that data to predict employee attrition.
“Our lawsuit alleges that Octopus has violated our Terms of Service and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by engaging in unauthorized and automated scraping and attempting to conceal their scraping and avoid being detected and blocked from Facebook and Instagram.”
Meta
Many people rely on web scraping, which includes archivists, researchers, journalists, and others who strongly rely on scraping public data. Not to mention, it is also a significant concern when it comes to legitimate privacy and security.
Meta has sued both Octopus Data (owned by Shenzhen Vision Information Technology Co.) and a Turkish individual, pursuing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) from Meta Section 3 of its Terms and Service instead of the CFAA. They were capable of mining the internet for insight, offering numerous services for Twitter, eBay, Yelp, Google, Target, Walmart, Indeed, LinkedIn, YouTube, LinkedIn, and much more.
“Octopus designed the software to scrape data accessible to the user when logged into their accounts, including data about their Facebook friends such as email address, phone number, gender, and date of birth, as well as Instagram followers and engagement information such as name, user profile URL, location, and number of likes and comments per post.”
Meta Say’s
Octopus claims to have 1 million customers and has access to software to scrape any website from a cloud-based platform. The data they collected from their Facebook friends once they logged in were their email address, phone number, gender, date of birth, name, profile URL, and the total number of likes and comments.
Since we do not know how this data will be used, publicly available data can be used to harm another person without their consent. Meta has tracked over 100 different Instagram clones of those published on scrapped data websites.