Facebook sues two companies engaged in data scraping operations

The companies, who gathered the data of Facebook users for marketing intelligence purposes, did so in violation of Facebooks Terms of Service, says Facebook.

According to BrandTotals website, its company offers a real-time competitive intelligence platform thats designed to give media, insights and analytics teams visibility into their competitions social media strategy and paid campaigns. These insights would allow its customers to analyze and shift their budget allocation to target new opportunities, monitor trends and threats from emerging brands, optimize their ads and messaging, and more.

But as the extensions page discloses, doing so would opt users into a panel that informed the advertising decisions of Unimanias corporate customers.

When users installed the extensions and visited Facebook websites, the extensions installed automated programs to scrape their name, user ID, gender, date of birth, relationship status, location information, and other information related to their accounts.

Data scrapers exist in part to collect as much information as they can through any means possible using automated tools, like bots and scripts.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has begun to pursue legal action against various developers that break its terms of service.

It has also invested in technical teams and tools to monitor and detect suspicious activity and the use of of unauthorized automation for scraping, it says.

Original article