The developer is a Portuguese company that Facebook claims developed malicious Chrome extensions allowing data scraping.
Data scraping against Facebook and other websites is a serious issue. Last year more than 500 million+ Facebook user data was scraped (1) and leaked online (2). Just last week, a Chinese firm was caught leaking 200 million Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn users’ records it harvested through data scraping.
While companies everyday digitally defend themselves from the actions of attackers, few take legal action in order to make their perpetrators pay.
In the latest, Facebook has done the latter where it has taken the developers of certain Google Chrome extensions to the court for illegally scraping data from the social media giant.
Prosecuted in Portugal, the case concerns 2 individuals who were running their business under the name of “Oink and Stuff.”
See: Chrome extensions with 80 million+ users found engaging in ad fraud
The extensions in discussion include:
Blue Messenger
Emoji keyboard
Green Messenger
Web for Instagram plus DM
According to Facebook, these extensions had a privacy policy that misled users by telling them that they did not collect any of their personal data. In reality, though, they of course did which included personally identifiable information from social media platforms such as Facebook including full names, gender, age, relationship status, and user IDs.
