Meta sued to stop a surveillance company from using it Facebook and Instagram, alleging that the company, which partnered with law enforcement, created tens of thousands of fake accounts to harvest user data.
A complaint lodged Thursday asks a judge to permanently ban Voyager Labs from accessing Meta sites and comes after a Guardian’s investigation revealed that the company partnered with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in 2019 and claimed it could use social media insights to predict who may commit a future crime.
Audience recordings Obtained by the non-profit Brennan Center for Justice and shared with the Guardian in 2021, it showed that Voyager services enabled police to monitor and investigate people by reconstructing their digital lives and making assumptions about their activity, including their network of friends. . In an internal filing, Voyager suggested it viewed using an Instagram name displaying Arab pride or tweeting about Islam as signs of potential extremism.
The lawsuit in California federal court details the activities that Meta he says discovered in July 2022, alleging Voyager used surveillance software that relied on fake accounts to scrape data from Facebook and Instagram, as well as Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Telegram. Voyager created and operated over 38,000 fake Facebook accounts to collect information from over 600,000 Facebook users, including posts, likes, friend lists, photos, comments and group information and pages, according to the complaint.
Affected users included employees of nonprofits, universities, media organizations, healthcare facilities, the U.S. Armed Forces, and local, state, and federal government agencies, as well as parents on time. full, retirees and union members, Meta said in his filing. It is unknown who Voyager’s customers were at the time and which entities may have received the data. But Voyager, which has offices in the US, UK, Israel, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, designed its software to hide its presence from Meta and sold and licensed to profit from the data it contains. obtained, according to the suit.
“Our hope is to amplify this message that this is not the right way to police people or the public,” Jessica Romero, director of platform enforcement and litigation at Meta, said in a statement. interview. “Some of the types of people that have been affected really don’t fit the kind of criminal profile that Voyager is trying to sell at the center of its data collection and analysis.”
Representatives for Voyager did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Some features Voyager advertised in records obtained by the Brennan Center posed significant ethical questions, including one the company called an “active character” that appeared to facilitate police use of fake profiles to access information otherwise. private on Facebook.
In November 2021, after internal records were revealed, Facebook sent the LAPD a letter asking him to stop all use of “fictitious” accounts by social media monitoring, saying the fake accounts were a violation of company policy requiring people to use their real names. The Meta-owned platform also said at the time that using data obtained from the platform for “surveillance, including processing platform data about individuals, groups or events for law enforcement or national security purposes” was prohibited.
While it’s unclear whether the LAPD ultimately used the fake profile feature when working with Voyager, emails showed officers saying it was a ‘great function’ and a “necessary” service.
Voyager is part of a larger industry of better-known players like Palantir who claim to make crime predictions based on past behaviors and activities, including those shared on social media. While the practice has been criticized by privacy and civil liberties advocates as pseudoscience that does little more than perpetuate bias and discrimination in policing, law enforcement continues to be keen to acquire solutions that aim to make their work more efficient and, in turn, to validate their decisions. And tech companies scrambling to make up for slowing industry growth have increasingly answered law enforcement’s call for new surveillance and policing products.
“It’s an industry that has a lot of technical capabilities, some of which are quite sophisticated and yet there’s no oversight or accountability,” Romero said. “We consider that we are doing our part to bring to light the types of information and behaviors that we have discovered.”
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center’s Freedom and National Security Program, said Meta’s lawsuit demonstrated how software tools like Voyager’s can enable massive data scraping: “It’s a very wide range of people who have been affected by this, and the public should notice and be alarmed at the scale of this type of collection.
She said the case could also have an impact beyond Voyager and should discourage police from pursuing these types of technologies: sends a signal to police departments and other law enforcement agencies considering these tools .
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