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Meta Sue Law Enforcement Data Scraper, Voyager Labs By Techagents

Meta is taking a law enforcement intelligence company to court for collecting data about users of its Facebook and Instagram properties.

The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California, alleges that Voyager Labs, an international scraping and monitoring service, improperly collected data from those properties through fake accounts that flouted the terms and conditions for use of the platform. is a violation.

In a January 12 post on Meta’s newsroom site, Jessica Romero, director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation, explained that Voyager’s proprietary software uses fake accounts to scrape data accessible to a user who is logged in to Facebook.

They said Voyager used a diverse system of computers and networks in different countries to hide its activity and thwart Meta’s efforts to verify fake accounts.

Romero wrote that Voyager did not compromise Facebook; Instead, it used fake accounts to scramble publicly viewable information.

“Web scraping is legal — if you’re scraping publicly available information,” observed Liz Miller, vice president and a principal analyst at Constellation Research, a technology research and advisory firm in Cupertino, California.

“In Meta’s case against Voyager Labs, the issue is the creation of a fake Facebook account, which was used for the purpose of data collection,” Miller told TechNewsWorld.

scrapping industry

Romero wrote that Meta is seeking a permanent injunction against Voyager to protect people from scraping-for-hire services.

“Companies like Voyager are part of an industry that provides scraping services to anyone, regardless of the target users and for what purpose, which includes profiling people for criminal behavior,” he continued.

“This industry secretly collects information that people share with their community, family and friends, without oversight or accountability, and in a way that can affect people’s civil rights,” she said.

“These services operate across multiple platforms and national borders and preventing the misuse of these capabilities requires a collective effort from platforms, policy makers and civil society.”


Voyager was not immediately available for comment on this story. However, a spokesperson told The Guardian in the past: “As a company, we comply with the laws of all countries in which we do business. We also trust those with whom we do business to comply with the law.” There are public and private organizations that follow.”

Meta Business Matters

While META emphasizes its efforts to protect people, it also has business ideas that need to be protected.

“Sadly, from Meta’s point of view the problem is not really about data scraping. The point is that Voyager did not pay Meta to do this,” KnowBe4, a security awareness training provider in Clearwater, Fla. Roger Grimes, a defense campaigner for the U.S., argued.

“If Voyager had paid, the meta would have been very happy,” Grimes told TechNewsworld.

Vincent Reynolds, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Emerson College in Boston, explained that data is at the heart of the business model for social media companies.

“The data that users produce is reused by these platforms for advertising,” Raynauld told TechNewsWorld. “It’s at the core of their business model.”

“With this lawsuit,” he continued, “they are trying to protect their business model. They want to take control of the data they have and prevent other companies from using the data.”

“When they see researchers or other companies scraping data, they see business opportunities go away,” he said.

Raynauld said, “There is a clear intention by the Meta to protect its assets here.” “It’s a shot across the bow of marketers and researchers.”

common practice, common problem

Scraping social media sites for data is a common practice.

“It is common for social media sites, from Facebook and Instagram to Twitter or LinkedIn, to scrape publicly available and viewable data,” Miller said.

“Advertisers and marketers commonly use it to track trends, target audiences, or create audience profiles,” she continued. “If you’ve ever compared prices on a site so that you can get a product at the best price, you’ve likely benefited from bot-based web scraping.”


Miller said most social scraping is for rather benign uses, but exceptions exist, such as bots deployed for ad fraud, traffic scams, identity takeover and account hacking.

“The scraping is probably much worse than anyone realized, including Meta,” Grimes said. “I’m sure hundreds if not thousands of data scraping operations are targeting social media sites every day.”

“It’s probably so bad,” he continued, “that Meta only has time to worry about the biggest and most revenue-damaging examples.”

Minimizing Unethical Scraping

Grimes said combating shady data scraping is a big problem. “It’s like phishing and password-guessing,” he said. “Vendors can’t hope to stop it. The best they can try to do is identify the easiest and stop the most prominent examples.

Miller said that most social media platforms have placed constraints through their terms and conditions of use to reduce malicious scraping.

“But what many want to subtract is non-malicious scraping, which forces organizations to turn to, for example, Meta, some of the insights that social scraping can provide,” she said.

Romero wrote that meta is one of the tools used to combat scraping. “We have also invested in technical teams and tools that monitor and detect suspicious activity and use unauthorized automation for scraping,” she explained.

“This focus on scraping is part of our ongoing work to protect people’s privacy,” she said. “In the coming months, we plan to discuss some of the other measures we are actively using to prevent scraping.”

legal whack-a-mole

Until those additional measures are disclosed to combat malicious scraping, litigation may be the most effective means of cracking down on the practice.

“Being sued is a huge motivator not to do it,” Grimes observed. “Who wants to be sued by a tech giant? You can spend millions for the first day of a court hearing, even if you did nothing wrong and are completely in the right.

“That’s the nature of lawsuits, especially in the US, where the loser often doesn’t have to pay the winner’s fees,” he said.

“Lawsuits are like getting a big hammer when playing whack-a-mole,” Miller said. “You can take one out of the game, but another malicious mole will likely pop back up.”

“But, in the absence of a law or a rule making scraping publicly available data illegal,” she continued, “the goal is to reduce them with litigation costs.”

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Amazon Sue Fingers Facebook Groups Recruiting Fake Reviewers By Techagents

A lawsuit was filed by Amazon on Tuesday against administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups accusing them of being part of a broker network for churning out fake product reviews.

In its lawsuit, Amazon alleges that administrators attempted to organize the placement of fake reviews on Amazon in exchange for money or free products. It said groups have been set up in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan to recruit people to write fake reviews on Amazon’s online store.

Amazon said in a statement posted online that it would use the information found through the lawsuit to identify bad actors and remove the reviews they commissioned from the retail website.

Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s Vice President of Selling Partner Services, said in the statement, “Our team intercepts millions of suspicious reviews before they are seen by customers, and this trial goes a step further to uncover criminals operating on social media.” ” “Proactive legal action targeting bad actors is one of many ways to protect customers by holding bad actors accountable.”

against meta policy

Meta, which owns Facebook, condemned the groups for setting up fake review mills on their infrastructure. “Groups that solicit or encourage fake reviews violate our policies and are removed,” Meta spokeswoman Jen Riding said in a statement to TechNewsWorld.

“We are working with Amazon on this matter and will continue to partner across the industry to address spam and fake reviews,” she said.

According to Meta, it has already removed most of the fraud groups cited in Amazon’s lawsuit and is actively investigating others for violating the company’s policy against fraud and deception.

It noted that it has introduced a number of tools to remove infringing content from its service, tools that use artificial intelligence, machine learning and computer vision to analyze specific instances of content that violate rules. Break down and identify patterns of abuse across the platform.

Is Facebook doing enough?

Rocio Concha, director of policy and advocacy, a consumer advocacy group in the UK, praised Amazon’s action, but questioned whether Facebook was doing enough to prevent abuse of its platform.

“It is positive that Amazon has taken legal action against some of the fake review brokers operating at Facebook, which is a problem the investigation has uncovered time and again,” he said in a statement. “However, it does raise a big question mark about Facebook’s proactive action to crack down on fake review agents and protect consumers.”

“Facebook needs to explain why this activity is prevalent, and [U.K.] The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) must challenge the company to show that the action it is taking is effective,” he continued. “Otherwise, it should consider stern action against the platform.”

“The government has announced that it plans to give stronger powers to the CMA to protect consumers from the avalanche of fake reviews,” he said. “These digital markets, competition and consumer reforms should be legislated as a priority.”

Which one in 2019? released a report that estimated that 250,000 hotel reviews on the Tripadvisor website were fake. Tripadvisor dismissed the analysis in that report as “simplistic,” but in its own “Transparency” report a year later, the site found nearly one million, or 3.6%, of the reviews were fake.

no time for deep dives

“Most consumers don’t have time to dig deep into reviews,” said Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research, a consumer technology advisory firm in New York City.

“They take star ratings as a way to build trust in a product and if people are being compensated for posting fake reviews, it undermines trust in reviews,” he told TechNewsWorld.

“Fake reviews not only encourage consumers to buy a substandard product, but they also make it more difficult to differentiate between products,” he said.

“If you have an overwhelming number of products in a category with four-and-a-half or five-star reviews, because many of them are participating in these fake review programs, the value of the reviews themselves are diminished,” he explained.

He acknowledged that fake reviews were a problem everywhere on the Internet. “But,” he continued, “because Amazon has such a strong position in online retailing and is often the first website consumers visit, it is disproportionately targeted by these fake review groups.”

Review mills also use bots to pad product reviews, but Rubin said the technology lacks the effectiveness of using a human. “The reason these groups are using people instead of bots is because bots are easier to detect,” he said. “Amazon uses machine learning techniques to identify when companies are using bots.”

‘Comprehensive’ review manipulation

In a report released last year by Uberall, an online and offline customer experience platform, review manipulation on Amazon was termed “pervasive.”

Amazon claims that only 1% of reviews on the site are fake, but the report disputed that. It cited a 2018 analysis by Fakespot that found the number of fake reviews in certain product categories such as nutritional supplements (64%), beauty (63%), electronics (61%), and athletic sneakers (59%) is more.

“Even if we reduce these numbers by 50%, there will still be a gap between what Amazon and Fakespot report,” Uberall’s report said.

What can be done to curb fake reviews?

Uberall points out that Amazon and some others use the label “Verified Buyer” to indicate high trust in reviews. “It is an approach that needs to be used more widely,” it noted, “though it is not foolproof, as Amazon has discovered.”

“Despite specific anti-fraud mechanisms,” it continued, “fake reviews are a problem that needs to be addressed more systematically and vigorously.”

The paths identified in the report to address the problem include using more technical sophistication and aggressive enforcement to bring review fraud down to low single digits, adopting a review framework that is structurally difficult to defraud and Only genuine verified buyers are to be allowed. Write a review.

“These are not mutually exclusive approaches,” it explained. “They can and should be used in conjunction with each other.”

“With online reviews there is a huge amount at stake for businesses of all sizes,” the report said. “More and better reviews directly translate into online visibility, brand equity and revenue. This creates powerful incentives for businesses to pursue positive reviews and suppress or remove negative reviews.”

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