Meta Sues Voyagers Lab For Collecting User Data Via Fake Accounts

A complaint was filed on Thursday that asked a judge to permanently ban Voyager Labs from accessing Meta’s sites. Reports further claim that the company had partnered with the Los Angeles police department (LAPD) in 2019 so that it could use social media information in order to predict who may commit a future crime.

A few Public records were also obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice that clearly showed that Voyager’s services enabled police in order to surveil and investigate people. They did this by reconstructing their digital lives and making assumptions about their activity, including their network of friends. The point worth mentioning here is that the lawsuit in federal court in California further unveils activities that Meta says it uncovered in July 2022.  It alleged that Voyager used surveillance software that relied on fake accounts in order to scrape data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Telegram.

According to the latest news, Voyager created and operated more than 38,000 fake Facebook accounts for collecting information from more than 600,000 Facebook users. The data collected included posts, likes, friends lists, photos, comments, and even information from groups and pages, according to the filed complaint.

Meta said in its filing that the affected users were actually employees of non-profits, universities, media organizations, healthcare facilities, federal government agencies, and the US Armed Forces along with full-time parents, retirees, and union members. It is still unclear who were Voyager’s clients at that time and what entities could have received the data. However, Voyager, which has offices in the US, the United Kingdom, Israel, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, designed its software in order to hide its presence from Meta and sold the collected data for profit.

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