Meta is now seeking a permanent injunction against Octopus Data and measures such as identifying where it scraped the data from, deleting it, and preventing the development, distribution and use of scraping tools from Facebook and Instagram without Meta’s permission.
Octoparse yelp software#
So even though information about the registrant was no longer publicly available, Meta said it caught SVIT CEO Keven Liu promoting the software on his personal Facebook account. was registered in March 2015 but was anonymized three years later in March 2018 using a privacy guard. Octoparse is also used to scrape data from Amazon, eBay, Twitter, Yelp, Google, Target, Walmart, Indeed, and LinkedIn, according to the lawsuit. See More: Big Setback for LinkedIn? Web Scraping Doesn’t Constitute Hacking, Court Rules Opens a new window This industry makes scraping available to individuals and companies that otherwise would not have the capabilities,” Meta said.
“Companies like Octopus are part of an emerging scraping industry that provides automation services to any customer - regardless of who they target and for what purpose they scrape. A caveat, however, is that for Octoparse to work, users need to give permission to the software and authenticate it. OctoParse lets users collect their Facebook friends’ data, such as email addresses, phone numbers, gender and dates of birth, and Instagram followers and engagement information such as names, user profile URLs, locations and number of likes and comments per post. One of Octopus Data’s products, Octoparse, is used to scrape all data accessible to any user when logged into their accounts. Octopus Data is a subsidiary of the China-based Shenzhen Vision Information Technology Co (SVIT), which develops data-related products and services. Meta’s lawsuit also alleges a violation of its terms and conditions that spell out the following: “You will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our prior permission.” Meta alleges that Octopus Data violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by engaging in “unauthorized and automated scraping and attempting to conceal their scraping and avoid being detected and blocked from Facebook and Instagram.” In a separate lawsuit, Meta is also suing Ekrem Ateş, a Turkish individual, for scraping off hundreds of thousands of Instagram users’ profiles. Facebook’s parent company Meta is suing Octopus Data, a U.S-based subsidiary of a “Chinese national high-tech enterprise,” for developing web scraping tools used on Facebook and Instagram.
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