Meta has announced a lawsuit against a surveillance company for using their platform for police investigations. 

The complaint alleges that the company, Voyager Lab, had broken Meta’s terms of service by creating fake profiles in order to scrape user information to share with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). 

Meta is seeking a permanent, legal ban against the group. 

Originally, a Guardian investigation revealed that Voyager was collaborating with the LAPD in 2019, claiming it could use social media to pre-empt criminals. 

In Meta’s complaint, they detail Voyager’s use of scraping software that used fake accounts to scrape data including user profile information, posts, friends lists, photos, and comments. 

“Voyager did not compromise Facebook,” Meta explained, but rather used fake accounts to access the data. 

According to the case filing, Meta alleges that at least 38,000 fake Facebook accounts were created in order to scrape public information from over 600,000 Facebook users and potentially share them with police.  

In public records shared by the Brennan Centre, event eh LAPD was concerned over Voyager’s tactics. 

Voyager Lab claimed to be able to pre-emptively predict criminal activity based on user’s profiles, including their likes, photos, followers and friends, using AI to determine the likelihood of an attack. 

In one case, Voyager claimed it could vet and classify people based on their social media to determine if their risk of becoming Islamic extremists. By scanning profiles, Voyager’s AI would label people based on a color-coded scheme. 

A user’s photos once earned them an ‘orange’ indicator simply for displaying their “pride in and identification with his Arab heritage” on Facebook and Instagram. 

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The LAPD at some point asked Voyager not to engage any tools that may involve ‘active monitoring’ for social medias, such as tracking changes in content or connections on social media. 

Voyager did not only rely on Meta platforms to conduct their surveillance, but other social media sites including Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Telegram. 

At the moment, it is uncertain if these other sites or their owners will seek litigation against Voyager or if Voyager used the same tactics of creating fake profiles. 

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