As part of a lawsuit filed against the digital surveillance firm Voyager Labs, Meta claims that the company created 38,000 fake, unauthorized accounts to collect 600,000 Facebook users' personal information.
A federal lawsuit filed by Microsoft has asked a California court for Voyager to be banned from Facebook and Instagram, claiming that the company scraped the “viewable profile information” of Facebook and Instagram users. They claim the company scraped posts, likes, friend lists, photos, and comments from Facebook and Instagram users. It has been reported that Facebook groups and pages were allegedly tapped for data.
After the company approached companies interested in monitoring social media without being detected, Voyager sold the company's tool to the highest bidder, according to Gizmodo.
In addition, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Telegram accounts were created to scrape data. So far, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, is the only social media firm that has taken legal action against Voyager.
The company wrote in a blog post about the legal filing. It said that Voyager had violated Facebook's terms of service regarding fake accounts and automated scraping and automating of user accounts. To hide its activity, Voyager used a network of computers and networks spread across many different countries to scrape user data, Meta further explained.
A free trial of Voyager's software was used by the Los Angeles Police Department in 2019, according to The Guardian in 2021.
Following a pitch from the company, they purchased it as a surveillance tool to monitor thousands of online friends of potential suspects.
It has been reported in the Guardian that LAPD was told that through this tool, officers would be able to "predict" crimes before they occur and communicate with potential victims.
PCMag's request for comment from Voyager was not immediately answered.
The Supreme Court allowed Meta earlier this week to pursue a lawsuit against Israeli spyware company NSO Group, which had gained access to WhatsApp servers "unlawfully" when installing spyware on users' devices through their WhatsApp accounts.
Last month, Meta accepted a one-year settlement from a class-action lawsuit in which the plaintiffs accused Meta of sharing personal data about their users without their consent, a move that did not end well for Meta. The lawsuit alleges the company shared users' data without their consent with third parties.
A lawsuit filed by Facebook in 2018 was filed after it was revealed that the company had shared up to 87 million Facebook users' Personal Information with a British consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica.
