Recently, Facebook has filed a lawsuit in the US upon the two companies that practiced scraping to interlock in a global data harvesting operation.
According to the lawsuit, both the companies scraped users’ data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Amazon, as they have the motive to sell these data to the “marketing intelligence” and many other services.
However, Facebook mentioned this business in the lawsuit as BrandTotal Ltd, and they asserted that this company is an Israel-based company, and Unimania Inc., which is consolidated in Delaware, and has violated Facebook’s terms of service.
That’s why Facebook is trailing all legal action to defend and guard their every user. In one of the newsrooms, the director of program enforcement and prosecution, miss Jessica Romero affirmed that scraping is a kind of data gathering that relies on unofficial mechanization, and their purpose is to extract data from the targeted website or app.
If we want to avoid our protections against scraping, these fellow companies have exploited our users’ way to our assistance by a set of browser extensions that are known as ‘UpVoice’ and ‘Ads Feed.’ All these are intended to obtain all the collected data from the apps.
According to the Facebook report, when the users install and open the extensions on Facebook websites, the browser extensions applied the automated applications to scrape their name, user ID, gender, date of birth, relationship status, location data, and other data that are associated with users accounts.
After then, the collected data was transferred to a server that has been approved with BrandTotal and Unimania. But on the other side, as per BrandTotal’s website, its business contributes a real-time competitive intelligence platform that’s intended to give media, penetrations, and analytics teams perceptibility into their opponent’s social media policy and paid operations.
All these insights would enable its customers to examine and substitute their budget allotment to attack all new opportunities, monitor courses and threats from all rising brands. Not only this, but they also optimize their ads, messaging, and more.
Moreover, Unlike previous Facebook’s lawsuit, the current legal action is mainly concentrated on two browser extensions that are being offered by both the companies Unimania’s “Ads Feed” and BrandTotal’s “UpVoice.”
This kind of case is one of the latest examples of Facebook’s efforts to agitate and reinforce against businesses that scrape user data, and also those who enable them. However, recently, in June, Facebook has filed lawsuits on two continents upon companies and individuals implementing all automation software assistance that allowed the scraping and fake action.
