Web Scraping News: October Monthly Recap
Meta settles a lawsuit against two companies scraping Facebook and Instagram data
original source: Techcrunch
Meta, Facebook parent company, has settled a lawsuit against two companies that were scraping data from Facebook and Instagram users for marketing intelligence purposes.
The original complaint was filed in October 2020 against BrandTotal Ltd, which claims to offer its customers a real-time competitive intelligence platform to monitor their competitors' social media strategy and paid campaigns.
The second company named in the suit is Unimania which offered apps to access social networks in different ways, like seeing Instagram stories anonymously.
In order to evade the website’s protections against scraping, these companies exploited users’ access to the service through a set of browser extensions called “UpVoice” and “Ads Feed” designed to access and collect data. When people installed the extensions and visited the websites the browser extensions used automated programs to scrape their name, user ID, gender, date of birth, relationship status, location information, and other information related to their accounts.