According to the latest reports, Meta has sued a surveillance company, Voyagers lab, for using Facebook and Instagram. The social media giant claims that the company cooperates with law enforcement and created tens of thousands of fake accounts to collect user data.
Voyagers Lab collected data from 600,000 Facebook users
A complaint was filed Thursday asking a judge to permanently deny Voyager Labs access to Meta’s sites. Reports further claim that in 2019 the company partnered with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) so it could use social media information to predict who might commit a future crime.
Some public documents were also obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice which clearly showed that Voyager’s services enabled the police to surveil and investigate people. They did this by reconstructing their digital lives and making assumptions about their activities, including their network of friends. The point worth noting is that the lawsuit in federal court in California reveals activities that Meta says it discovered in July 2022. It was alleged that Voyager used surveillance software that relied on fake accounts to collect data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Telegram.
According to the latest news, Voyager has created and managed more than 38,000 fake Facebook accounts to collect information from more than 600,000 Facebook users. The data collected includes posts, likes, friend lists, photos, comments and even information from groups and pages, according to the complaint filed.
Meta said in its filing that affected users were actually employees of nonprofits, universities, media organizations, health care organizations, federal government agencies and the United States armed forces, along with full-time parents, retirees and union members. It is still unclear who Voyager’s customers were at the time and which entities might have received the data. However, Voyager, which has offices in the US, UK, Israel, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, designed its software to hide its presence from Meta and sold the collected data for profit.
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