San Francisco. Facebook has filed a lawsuit against two companies that tried to sell ‘marketing intelligence’ and other services in a global operation by scraping data from its flagship apps, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Amazon. Scraping is a data collection that works on unauthorized automation for the purpose of extracting data from a website or app.
Facebook said in a statement, “The acts of Israel-based company Brand Total Ltd. and Delaware-based Unimania Inc. have violated our Terms of Service and we are taking legal steps against them to protect our users.”
These companies affected users’ access to the Facebook service through a set of browser extensions called ‘Up Voice’ and ‘AIDS Feed’ designed to access and store data.
When people install extensions and visit websites, the browser extension used an automated program to scrap their name, user ID, gender, date of birth, relationship status, location information and other information related to their account .
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