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Meta has filed separate lawsuits against a company and an individual for scraping data from Facebook and Instagram.
The first lawsuit is against Octopus, a U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese national high-tech company that claims to have more than 1 million clients.
Customers can pay Octopus to scrape webpages for them or use its cloud-based platform to initiate scraping attacks.
Octopus offers to scrape information from sites including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Target, Yelp, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, and eBay.
In a Newsroom post, Meta’s director of platform enforcement and litigation Jessica Romero said, “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.”
Romero also said Meta is seeking a permanent injunction against Octopus.
“Protecting people against scraping for hire services, operating across many platforms and national boundaries, also requires a collective effort from platforms, policymakers, and civil society and is needed to deter the abuse of these capabilities both among those who sell them and those who buy them.”
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In the second case, Meta accused Turkish citizen Ekrem Ateş, the operator behind “MyStalk,” a software that uses automated Instagram accounts to scrape information from more than 350,000 users.
According to Meta, Ates posts this information on his website or “clone sites,” which copy and display Instagram profiles, posts, and other content without authorization.
Romero said, “Since February 2021, we have taken a number of enforcement actions against this Defendant, including disabling accounts, sending a cease and desist letter, and revoking his access to Meta’s services.”
In 2020, Meta also filed a lawsuit against a defendant for using Instagram to scrape people’s publicly available information to build a network of clone websites.
The court ruled in favor of the tech giant and ordered the defendant to pay $200,000. Likewise, the defendant was banned from using Facebook or Instagram.
You can check regular updates and insights on Meta’s privacy initiatives on its Privacy Matters page.
Source: Meta
Jaw de Guzman is the content producer for Comms Room, a knowledge platform and website aimed at assisting the communications industry and its professionals.
