Meta Sues Company With Ties to China for Scraping Facebook, Instagram Data
Meta is suing a little-known company with ties to China for scraping people’s personal data on both Facebook and Instagram.
The legal dispute concerns a California-based company called Octopus Data, which has been offering web-scraping services as a marketing tool via a site called Octoparse(Opens in a new window). On Tuesday, Meta filed a lawsuit in a US district court to stop the practice, citing users' privacy.
“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 claims(Opens in a new window).
Meta’s lawsuit also points out Octoparse is owned by Shenzhen Vision Information Technology Co. (SVIT), a provider(Opens in a new window) of “big data products” capable of mining the internet for insights.
Meta claims SVIT may have tried to conceal its ties to Octoparse after registering the domain in 2015. “By March 21, 2018, the registration was anonymized using privacy guard and information about the registrant was no longer publicly available,” the company’s lawsuit(Opens in a new window) says.
Nevertheless, Meta said it spotted SVIT CEO Keven Liu promoting the web-scraping service on his Facebook page.
Meta is now demanding the US court intervene, citing how the web scraping violates the terms of service for both Facebook and Instagram. The lawsuit also notes Octoparse was built with various evasion features to prevent companies such as Meta from detecting the web scraping. In addition to Facebook and Instagram,
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