Meta sues Chinese firm’s US subsidiary for scraping Facebook and Instagram data

Facebook parent company Meta has said that it is suing the US subsidiary of a Chinese tech company, accusing it of offering data scraping services for Facebook and Instagram.

Formerly Facebook, Meta recently faced a backlash from rivals such as Apple over the costs it imposed on apps created for its digital actuality headsets.

According to TechCrunch, the US platform is now suing both tech company Octopus Data and an individual who it said the company alleges started automated Instagram accounts to scrape data from 350,000 Instagram users.

Octopus Data is an offshoot ofShenzhen Vision Information Technology Co., according to its website, and it claims to have launched its core product in 2016.

Both cases have been filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The publication added that the timing of these cases are particularly interesting, coming less than three months after a US court reaffirmed an earlier ruling that web-scraping is legal.

It said that even though this outcome was championed by many across all industries, it unsteadied privacy and security concerns surrounding how people’s data can be acquired without their permission.

In this instance, TechCrunch stated that the court ruled scraping publicly-accessible information as not contravening the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a cybersecurity law that governs computer hacking in the US.

Meta confirmed that it is also filing a suit against a Turkey-based individual, Ekrem Ateş, who allegedly published scraped Instagram data to their own websites, or so-called “clone sites.”