Meta settles lawsuits with two firms using its platforms for data scraping

Meta (formerly Facebook) has settled a lawsuit for “significant sum” against two companies that were engaged in data scraping operations on its platforms

• Meta (formerly Facebook) has settled a lawsuit for “significant sum” against two companies that were engaged in data scraping operations on its platforms.

• Israel-based BrandTotal and US-incorporated Unimania, agreed to a permanent injunction banning them from scraping Facebook and Instagram data going forward or profiting from the data they collected.

• “BrandTotal and Uninamia also agreed to pay a significant financial sum as part of the settlement,” said Meta.

• Meta, however, did not disclose the sum paid to the two firms.

• The social network originally filed the lawsuits in October 2020 in the US against two companies that used scraping to engage in an international data harvesting operation.

• These companies scraped data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Amazon, in order to sell “marketing intelligencea and other services.

• “The actions of BrandTotal and Unimania violate our Terms of Service and we are pursuing legal action to protect our users,” Meta had said.

• Scraping is a form of data collection that relies on unauthorised automation for the purpose of extracting data from a website or app.

• Meta then filed a new complaint in federal court in California against BrandTotal and Unimania after the defendants published a new malicious extension on Google’s Chrome Web Store designed to scrape Facebook, in violation of Facebook’s Terms and Policies and state and federal law.

Source : Business Standard