Meta is framing the lawsuit as an opening volley in a war against data scraping and invasive surveillance by law enforcement partners. The surveillance company has clearly gone farther than is usual given the creation of some 38,000 fake accounts.
The GDPR fine was sparked by a round of media reports in early 2021 documenting how the personal data of over 530 million Facebook users was left open to data scraping for an extended period thanks to faults in certain tools.
A new "combination file" offered on the dark web that makes connections between Clubhouse and Facebook users is a threat to create a spike in specific attack types, namely phishing and account takeover attempts.
Another social media platform API has been abused for data scraping. A listing offering 700 million LinkedIn profiles has appeared on an underground hacking forum.
Hot on the heels of high-profile data scraping incidents at Facebook and LinkedIn, the personal information of about 1.3 million users of chat app Clubhouse has been found posted to a hacker forum.
A Chinese startup leaked information of more than 214 million social media users obtained through data scraping, including private information not provided on social profiles.
Facebook is suing two websites for allegedly abusing its platforms to sell likes on Instagram and for data scraping of private information from users.
