Surveillance Tech Firm Sued By Meta For Using Thousands Of Bogus Accounts To Scrape Data
About a half-decade ago, major social media companies finally did something to prevent their platforms from being used to engage in mass surveillance. Prompted by revelations in public records, Twitter and Facebook began cutting off API access to certain data scrapers that sold their services to government agencies. Twitter blocked both Dataminr and Geofeedia from accessing its firehose" API. Facebook did the same thing to Geofeedia, denying it access to both its core service and Instagram.
That may have had some impact on these companies' ability to secure new government contracts, but there are plenty of others willing to fill the tiny void left by this disruption. And they're willing to break the rules that govern users of social media platforms, just like the law enforcement agencies they sell to.
Meet Voyager Labs, first exposed late last year by The Guardian, which based its report on public records obtained by the Brennan Center. Here's what Voyager offers to its law enforcement customers, which include the Los Angeles Police Department:
Pulling information from every part of an individual's various social media profiles, Voyager helps police investigate and surveil people by reconstructing their entire digital lives - public and private. By relying on artificial intelligence, the company claims, its software can decipher the meaning and significance of online human behavior, and can determine whether subjects have already committed a crime, may commit a crime or adhere to certain ideologies.
But new documents, obtained through public information requests by the Brennan Center, a non-profit organization, and shared with the Guardian, show that the assumptions the software relies on to draw those conclusions may run afoul of first amendment protections. In one case, Voyager indicated that it considered using an Instagram name that showed Arab pride or tweeting about Islam to be signs of a potential inclination toward extremism.
The documents also reveal Voyager promotes a variety of ethically questionable strategies to access user information, including enabling police to use fake personas to gain access to groups or private social media profiles.
It's that last part - the use of fake personas - that's getting Voyager sued by Meta, Facebook's parent company. Facebook has let law enforcement officers know - on multiple occasions - that setting up fake accounts violates its terms of use. It also informed (repeatedly) this particular enabler of ToS violations. When it was ignored to the tune of tens of thousands of bogus accounts by Voyager, it sued, as Jess Weatherbed reports for The Verge.
According to a legal filing issued on November 11th, Meta alleges that Voyager Labs created over 38,000 fake Facebook user accounts and used its surveillance software to gather data from Facebook and Instagram without authorization. Voyager Labs also collected data from sites including Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram.
Meta says Voyager Labs used fake accounts to scrape information from over 600,000 Facebook users between July 2022 and September 2022. Meta says it disabled more than 60,000 Voyager Labs-related Facebook and Instagram accounts and pages on or about" January 12th.
The updated complaint [PDF], containing more than 1,500 pages of exhibits covering everything from Voyager's financial statements to its communications with law enforcement users, seeks an injunction blocking Voyager from further violating Facebook's terms of service agreement.
This is kind of a pleasant surprise. Restricting the complaint to breach of contract actions under both state and federal law keeps the oft-abused CFAA out of it. Had the CFAA been brought into this as a cause of action, it would have created the possibility that researchers, academics, and others who scrape Facebook for useful data might have been harmed by an expansive reading of the CFAA's unauthorized access" clause. Fortunately, the CFAA is not in play here, with Meta content to seek damages for Voyager's repeated violations of its agreements with Facebook.
If Meta succeeds, Voyager's real time" scraping service will cease to be useful to its customers. And if the company gets a favorable ruling that results in the collection of damages, fewer companies will be as likely to violate rules just so they can sell stuff to cops.