Meta, a social media management platform, has filed a lawsuit against Voyager Labs, a surveillance company, accusing it of creating tens of thousands of fake accounts to scrape data from more than 600,000 Facebook users’ profiles. The company claims that Voyager Labs pulled information such as posts, likes, friend lists, photos, and comments, along with other details from groups and pages. Meta also claims that Voyager Labs masked its activity using its Surveillance Software and scraped data from Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Telegram to sell and license for profit.
In the complaint, Meta has asked a judge to permanently ban Voyager Labs from Facebook and Instagram. Meta claims that Voyager Labs scraped data from accounts belonging to “employees of non-profit organizations, universities, news media organizations, healthcare facilities, the armed forces of the United States, and local, state, and federal government agencies, as well as full-time parents, retirees, and union members.”
The company claims that Voyager Labs’ actions have caused it to incur damages, including investigative costs, in an amount to be proven at trial. The company has disabled accounts linked to Voyager Labs and filed the suit to enforce its terms and policies. Meta has said that companies like Voyager Labs are part of an industry that provides scraping services to anyone regardless of the users they target and for what purpose, including as a way to profile people for criminal behavior.
In 2021, The Guardian reported that the Los Angeles Police Department had tested Voyager Labs’ social media surveillance tools 2019. The company is said to have told the department that police could use the software to track the accounts of a suspect’s friends on social media, and that the system could predict crimes before they took place by making assumptions about a person’s activity.
