Facebook parent company Meta (Metaverse) filed separate lawsuits against two data harvesting sites. The suit accuses them of scraping user data from Facebook and Instagram for unauthorized use. One of the lawsuits is against the U.S. subsidiary of a national high-tech company in China.
In its complaint, Meta says California-based Octopus Data has operated an “illegal service” called Octoparse since March 25, 2015, for the purpose of “improperly collecting or ‘scraping’ user account profiles and other information from sites including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Amazon.”
The US social media giant said in a statement Tuesday: “Octopus designed software that captures data that is only available to users after logging into their accounts, including data about their Facebook friends, such as email addresses. , information about Instagram followers and engagement, including name, user profile URL, location, and the amount of likes and comments, as well as phone number, gender, and birthdate. and the number of likes and comments per post.”
Octopus Data is a U.S. subsidiary of Shenzhen Vision Information Technology Co., Ltd., or SVIT, Meta said in its complaint.
According to the website of Shenzhen Vision Information Technology Co., Ltd., this company is a “national high-tech enterprise dedicated to providing big data software and industry solutions”. At the top of the list, as of 2021, the number of global users will exceed 3 million. Octoparse is the overseas version of Octopus, “deeply cultivating markets such as North America, Europe, and Japan.”
Meta said in Tuesday’s complaint that Baoqiang Liu, CEO of Shenzhen Vision Information Technology Co. Ltd., registered the octoparse.com domain name in his own name on March 25, 2015, but “by March 21, 2018, this registration was Privacy protections are anonymized and information about registrants is no longer publicly available.”
Meta said that Baoqiang Liu used his personal Facebook account to promote web scraping software on Facebook, and some employees or agents of Octopus also promoted this software by creating a Facebook account.
Meta said that the defendant company’s practices were not authorized by Meta and violated Meta’s and Instagram’s terms of service and policies, as well as federal and California laws. The complaint says Octopus harvesting software has various evasion features to prevent companies like Meta from detecting web scraping.
The U.S. technology company asked the U.S. District Court for an injunction to prohibit Octopus Data from using Facebook and Instagram and to pay damages. Meta said the company has shut down Facebook and Instagram accounts associated with the octopus.
Octopus Data did not immediately respond to VOA’s request for comment. On the product introduction page of its website, the company says its web scraping tool can meet most data collection requirements, including tracking and monitoring prices, using website data scraping to improve marketing strategies, and web scraping to drive research or data. Model.
The defendant in another lawsuit filed by Meta on Tuesday is Ekrem Ateş, an individual based in Turkey, alleging that he used automated Instagram accounts to scrape the profiles of more than 350,000 Instagram users without authorization Facebook parent company.
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