Meta decided to sue Voyager Labs, a surveillance company that allegedly developed tools to predict a person's criminal activities based on their past behavior and online activity. This company allegedly created more than 60,000 fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram to collect user data.
Meta, Facebook's parent company, has decided to file a lawsuit in federal court in California against Voyager Labs, BFM Tech reports. This surveillance company is suspected of having collected data on users of Facebook, Instagram or other websites with the aim of predicting criminal behavior.
Meta announced the information on its site on Thursday, January 12, 2023. Voyager Labs would have created tens of thousands of fake accounts, including 38,000 on Facebook, for the purposes of this experiment. Mark Zuckerberg's firm is said to have deactivated more than 60,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts and pages linked to Voyager Labs. Which company would have used monitoring software that would have allowed it to collect data from more than 600,000 users during the period between July and September 2022.
Prohibition of use and compensation
As part of its lawsuit, Meta is asking the court to ban Voyager Labs from using Facebook, Instagram and all related services. The parent company considers that the surveillance company has violated its terms of use. The American giant is also asking for compensation because it claims that Voyager Labs was able to enrich itself at its expense.
Voyager Labs, which bills itself as "a global leader in advanced AI-based forensic solutions," believes that a person's future criminal activity can be predicted based on past behavior and online activity. . In 2021, the company had managed to offer its expertise to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as reported by The Guardian. Two years earlier, the LAPD revealed that the technology was inconsistent and racially biased after conducting an internal audit of its programs based on Voyager Labs data.
