Meta Alleges Surveillance Firm Collected Data On 600,000 Users Via Fake Accounts
Meta has sued to block a surveillance company from using Facebook and Instagram, alleging the firm, which has partnered with law enforcement, created tens of thousands of fake accounts to collect user data.
A complaint filed on Thursday asks a judge to permanently ban Voyager Labs from accessing Meta’s sites and comes after a Guardian investigation revealed the company had partnered with the Los Angeles police department (LAPD) in 2019 and claimed that it could use social media information to predict who may commit a future crime.
Public records obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-profit organization, and shared with the Guardian in 2021, showed that Voyager’s services enabled police to surveil and investigate people by reconstructing their digital lives and making assumptions about their activity, including their network of friends. In one internal record, Voyager suggested that it considered using an Instagram name displaying Arab pride or tweeting about Islam to be signs of potential extremism.
The lawsuit in federal court in California details activities that Meta says it uncovered in July 2022, alleging that 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 more than 38,000 fake Facebook accounts to collect information from more than 600,000 Facebook users, including posts, likes, friends lists, photos, comments and information from groups and pages, according to the complaint.
The affected users included employees of non-profits, universities, media organizations, healthcare facilities, the US armed forces and local, state and federal government agencies, along with full-time parents, retirees and union members, Meta said in its filing. It is unclear who Voyager’s clients were at that time and what entities may have received the data. But Voyager, which has offices in the US, the United Kingdom, Israel, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, designed its software to hide its presence from Meta and sold and licensed for profit the data it obtained, the suit says.
“Our hope is to amplify this message that this is not the right way to police people or the public,” Jessica Romero, Meta’s director of platform enforcement and litigation, said in an interview. “Some of the types of people that were impacted really don’t fit the kind of criminal profile that Voyager tries to sell as the focus of their data collection and analysis.”
Voyager representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
Some features that Voyager advertised in the records obtained by the Brennan Center posed significant ethical questions, including one the company called an “active persona” which appeared to facilitate police use of fake profiles to gain access to otherwise private information on Facebook.
In November 2021, after the internal records were revealed, Facebook sent the LAPD a letter demanding that it cease all social media surveillance use of “dummy” accounts, saying fake accounts were a violation of the company’s policy requiring that people use their real names. The Meta-owned platform also said at the time that using data obtained from the platform for “surveillance, including the processing of platform data about people, groups, or events for law enforcement or national security purposes” was prohibited.
While it is unclear whether the LAPD ultimately used the fake profile feature while working with Voyager, emails showed that officers said it was a “great function” and a “need-to-have” service.
Voyager is a part of a broader industry of better-known players like Palantir that purport to make crime predictions based on past behaviors and activity including those shared on social media. While the practice has been criticized by privacy and civil liberty advocates as pseudoscience that does little more than perpetuate bias and discrimination in policing, law enforcement continues to be eager to acquire solutions that purport to make their jobs more efficient and, in turn, validate their decisions. And tech firms working to offset the industry’s slowing growth have increasingly answered law enforcement’s call for new surveillance and policing products.
“This is an industry that has a lot of technical capabilities, some of which are pretty sophisticated and yet there’s no oversight or accountability,” Romero said. “We view this as us doing our part to bring to light the kinds of information and conduct we’ve uncovered.”
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, managing director of the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program, said Meta’s lawsuit demonstrated how software tools like Voyager’s can enable mass scraping of data: “It’s a really wide range of people who have been affected by this, and the public should notice and be alarmed by the scope of this kind of collection.”
She said the case could also have an impact beyond Voyager and should discourage police from pursuing these kinds of technologies: “It sends a pretty clear signal generally to the surveillance-for-hire industry that they could face legal action, and I hope it also sends a signal to police departments and other law enforcement agencies that are considering these tools.”
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