Facebook filed lawsuits against individuals for data scraping

Facebook Lawsuits 2020: Social Media giant Facebook Inc has filed a lawsuit against developers and websites in Europe and the United States.

According to Facebook, they were offer automate tools for scraping user data and gathering like.

Facebook sues a developer alleging that he was behind a data scraping campaign. According to court documents he took personal information from thousands of people, including login credentials.

The Social Network said it's filing a lawsuit against Mohammad Zaghar and his website

MassRoot8 saying The Company had been collect data from Facebook users without permission.

The lawsuit was filed in California's northern district It alleges that Zaghar's website provided customers the ability to scrap Facebook friend data.

The data includes phone numbers, gender, date of birth, and email addresses.

All that data is publicly share by those Facebook user, but the Automation ostensibly offer by Zaghar website will allow people to collect the Information at a much faster rate and on a wider scale.

Facebook also accuse Zaghar of using a botnet to circumvent Facebook detection by pretend to be Android devices that use the social network.

Zaghar did not answer the request for comment

The data scraping campaign, Facebook said, ran from April 23 to May 6, with about 5,500 people signing up for the service.

Beside the data scraped on Facebook from the friends of those 5,500 customers, Massroot8 also required its customers to provide their login credentials, the lawsuit said.

"As a result, Zaghar's customers self-compromised their Facebook account by relinquishing control of their username and password," Facebook said in the lawsuit.

The company said it sent several cessation and withdrawal orders to Zaghar, as well as suspending its Facebook and Instagram accounts and asking customers to update their passwords for security purposes.

Facebook’s Strictness towards Data Abuse - Facebook Lawsuits 2020

Facebook has increasingly turned to lawsuits to stop data abuse on its platform. It sued app developers last August for alleged fraud and an analytics firm in February for allegedly harvesting personal information from individuals.

Facebook also filed a complaint in Spain in conjunction with the lawsuit filed against Zaghar against a company that offered fake likes and comments on Instagram.

Jessica Romero, Facebook's director of platform enforcement and litigation, said in a blog post, "This is one of the first times a social media company is using coordinated, multi-jurisdictional litigation to enforce its Terms and protect its users.

" She said, "The defendants in the European lawsuit operated a Spain-based fake engagement service, and the defendant in the US lawsuit operated a data scraping service with ties to California."

The social networking giant has policies against data scraping, in the past sending cease-and-desist warnings to Clearview AI, a facial recognition firm to snatch public images of the site.

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Scraped data from Facebook's public posts may be of interest to advertisers and possible scammers. Security researchers last September found a database of $1000 worth of scraped phone numbers and Facebook IDs for sale.

Facebook's complaint argues that Zaghar breached the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, alleging that without permission he illegally accessed Facebook's servers, and misused the approximately 5,500 customer login details.

In its lawsuit, the company seeks $75,000 in damages.