Facebook sues 2 firms in US over international data scraping operation

Team Udayavani, Oct 2, 2020, 8:09 PM IST

Facebook filed a lawsuit in the US against two firms that allegedly used scraping to engage in an international data harvesting operation.

The firms scraped data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Amazon, in order to sell “marketing intelligence” and other services. The businesses named in the suit are Israel-based BrandTotal and US-incorporated Unimania.

As reported by Tech Crunch, BrandTotal company offers a real-time competitive intelligence platform that’s designed to give media, insights and analytics teams visibility into their competition’s social media strategy and paid campaigns.

These insights would allow its customers to analyze and shift their budget allocation to target new opportunities, monitor trends and threats from emerging brands, optimize their ads and messaging and more.