Octopus, a US subsidiary of a Chinese high-tech company, and a Turkish individual have been sued by Meta for scraping data from Facebook, Instagram, and other major technology platforms.
Octopus claims to have over one million customers and provides scraping services as well as software access for customers to scrape any website.
Customers of Octopus can launch scraping attacks from its cloud-based platform for a fee or hire Octopus to scrape websites directly.
“Octopus offers to scrape data from Amazon, eBay, Twitter, Yelp, Google, Target, Walmart, Indeed, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram,” Meta said in a statement late on Tuesday.
Octopus created the software to scrape data that users can access when logged into their accounts.
It contained information about their Facebook Friends such as email address, phone number, gender, and date of birth, as well as Instagram followers and engagement data such as name, user profile URL, location, and number of likes and comments per post.
“We are seeking a permanent injunction against Octopus,” said Meta.
The social network also filed a lawsuit against Ekrem Ates, a Turkish citizen, for using automated Instagram accounts to scrape data from the profiles of over 3,50,000 Instagram users.
Instagram users who were logged in could see these profiles.
Ates then published the scraped data on his own websites, which he referred to as “ceclone sites.”
Meta tracked over 100 different Instagram clone sites in the first half of 2021.
“By mid-year, through our disruption efforts, the known clone site ecosystem was reduced by approximately 90 per cent,” the company informed.
A clone site is a third-party site that duplicates the content of another site, in whole or in part.
Clone sites can be used to display people’s scraped data, scam people, and harm the original site’s credibility, among other things.
