Meta sues Voyager Labs for scraping users’ data

Meta has filed a lawsuit against Voyager Labs for allegedly creating tens of thousands of fake accounts to scrape data from more than 6,00,000 Facebook users’ profiles.

The surveillance firm has reportedly gathered information such as posts, likes, friend lists, photos, and comments, along with other details from groups and pages. Meta claims that Voyager has also scraped data from Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Telegram to sell and license for profit.

Meta claims that Voyager scraped data from accounts belonging to “employees of non-profit organizations, universities, news media organizations, healthcare facilities, the armed forces of the United States, and local, state, and federal government agencies, as well as full-time parents, retirees, and union members”.

The company disabled accounts linked to Voyager and filed the suit to enforce its terms and policies. In the lawsuit, Meta said Voyager's actions have caused it “to incur damages, including investigative costs, in an amount to be proven at trial”.

In the complaint, Meta has asked to permanently ban Voyager from Facebook and Instagram. The filling says, “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 enjoined.”