In continuing its efforts to enforce its terms and policies against developers that engage in unauthorized scraping of user data, this week Facebook brought suit against two marketing analytics firms,
According to the Complaint, the defendants coaxed users to install their UpVoice and Ads Feed extensions by, among other things, offering gift cards in exchange for downloading and suggesting that users would become "panelists" impacting marketing strategies of large companies. Facebook further claims that defendant BrandTotal deceived visitors to its website into believing Facebook and other social media services were working with BrandTotal by identifying Facebook and the other companies as "participating sites," when in fact Facebook never authorized the defendants to scrape user data. In fact, Facebook alleges that once installed, the browser extensions harvested, without Facebook's authorization, the users' profile information, user advertisement interest information and various public and nonpublic ad metrics when the users visited Facebook, Instagram or various other social sites (all despite users' account privacy settings). As laid out in the Complaint, the defendants' extensions were programmed to send commands to Facebook and Instagram servers appearing to originate from the user, not the defendants, and then scrape the data and transmit it back to the user, and then onto the defendants' own servers. The data collected by defendants was then presumably used to provide "marketing intelligence" services about users and advertisers.
Facebook states that it undertook various technical measures against the defendants in
Beyond the issues discussed above, the instant dispute should also resonate with any entity that acquires anonymized social media analytics from third party vendors. As we've previously stated - and regardless of the outcome of this dispute - it is important for downstream recipients of aggregated web or user data or reports processing such data to understand how such data is collected and whether such collection comports with applicable law or contractual requirements.
Originally published by Proskauer,
Facebook Brings Suit Against Developers Of A Browser Extension That Harvested User Data
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