Facebook launches legal actions against websites harvesting users’ data

According to ZDNet, Facebook has filed two lawsuits against two websites that allegedly abused its platforms to sell Instagram likes and harvest personal details on Facebook users. In a blogpost,  Facebook’s Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation Jessica Romero indicated that Facebook Inc. and Facebook Ireland sued MGP25 Cyberint Services and its founder in the commercial court of Madrid for providing automation software to distribute fake likes and comments on Instagram. The defendant’s service was designed to evade Instagram’s restrictions against fake engagement by mimicking the official Instagram app by connecting to Facebook’s systems. In a separate lawsuit, Facebook Inc. also sued Mohammad Zaghar in federal court in San Francisco for operating a data scraping service called Massroot8. This service asked people to provide their Facebook login credentials on the Massroot8 website. The credentials were then used by Zaghar’s service to scrape user data from Facebook. Zaghar collected the data by using a computer program to control a network of bots, which pretended to be an Android device connected to the official Facebook mobile app.