Meta has filed a authorized grievance towards an organization for allegedly creating tens of hundreds of faux Fb accounts to scrape consumer information and supply surveillance companies for shoppers.
The agency, Voyager Labs, payments itself as “a world chief in superior AI-based investigation options.” What this implies in follow is analyzing social media posts en masse to be able to make claims about people. In 2021, for instance, The Guardian reported how Voyager Labs offered its companies to the Los Angeles Police Division, with the corporate claiming to foretell which people had been prone to commit crimes sooner or later.
Voyager Labs is accused of making over 38,000 pretend Fb consumer accounts to scrape information
Meta introduced the authorized motion in a weblog post on January twelfth, claiming that Voyager Labs violated its phrases of service. In accordance with a authorized submitting issued on November eleventh, Meta alleges that Voyager Labs created over 38,000 pretend Fb consumer accounts and used its surveillance software program to collect information from Fb and Instagram with out authorization. Voyager Labs additionally collected information from websites together with Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram.
Meta says Voyager Labs used pretend accounts to scrape data from over 600,000 Fb customers between July 2022 and September 2022. Meta says it disabled greater than 60,000 Voyager Labs-related Fb and Instagram accounts and pages “on or about” January twelfth.
Meta is demanding that the corporate cease violating its phrases of service and requests that the courts ban Voyager Labs from utilizing Fb, Instagram, and companies associated to these platforms. The corporate additionally requests that the agency compensate Meta for its “ill-gotten income in an quantity to be confirmed at trial,” claiming that Voyager Labs unjustly enriched itself at Meta’s expense.
Research counsel these predictive applied sciences are ineffective and racially biased
Voyager Labs is one in all many firms — together with the likes of Palantir — that declare to have the ability to predict future prison exercise based mostly on a person’s previous conduct and on-line exercise. Consultants say these applied sciences are flawed and that the algorithms are too easy to successfully predict crime. In 2019, the LAPD carried out an inner audit of one in all its data-driven packages, revealing that the tech was inconsistent and racially biased.
“Firms like Voyager are a part of an trade that gives scraping companies to anybody whatever the customers they aim and for what goal, together with as a technique to profile folks for prison conduct,” mentioned Jessica Romero, Meta’s director of platform enforcement and litigation. “This trade covertly collects data that individuals share with their group, household and buddies, with out oversight or accountability, and in a means which will implicate folks’s civil rights.”
