NYPD spent millions to contract with firm banned by Meta for fake profiles

Documents show authorities bought Voyager Lab products which the company claims can use AI to map online human behavior

New York law enforcement agencies have spent millions of dollars to expand their capabilities to track and analyze social media posts, new documents show, including by contracting with a surveillance firm accused of improperly scraping social media platforms for data.

Documents obtained by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (Stop), a privacy advocacy non-profit and shared with the Guardian, reveal the New York police department in 2018 entered a nearly $9m contract with Voyager Labs, a surveillance company that has been sued by Meta for using nearly 40,000 fake Facebook accounts to collect data on an estimated 600,000 users.