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| Facebook is suing a company that collects Instagram data |
Facebook has taken legal action against Ensar Sahinturk, forcing it to collect public information about people from the Instagram platform in order to create a network of cloned sites.
The Turkish company Ensar Sahinturk violated the terms of use by copying and posting personal accounts and other information from Instagram without the user's knowledge or consent.
As a result, users lose visibility and control over who views their content and interacts with their accounts. Anyone can enter their Instagram username to view their account, photos, videos, and stories. And his hashtags and website.
Ensar Sahinturk used automated processes to collect public accounts, photos and videos from more than 100,000 accounts without permission and publish this data on its network of websites.
Facebook has been aware of the clone sites network since November 2019. This Turkish company controls several websites, many of which have similar names to Instagram, including Jolygram, Imggram, Finalgram, Pikdo and Ingram.
Jolygram has been in use since August 2017. As the network expanded, more websites were registered in the years that followed.
Facebook did not mention the size of these sites in terms of the number of visitors, but rather described the massive web traffic of the cloned sites.
In addition to Facebook trademark infringement claims associated with these sites, these sites also contain data that has been cloned by Instagram via a program that pretends to be a human rather than a data access robot.
The Turkish company managed to evade the security of the machine tools by pretending that the request came from someone using the official Instagram app.
Ensar Sahinturk has used thousands of fake Instagram accounts that mimic actions that real Instagram app users can take.
Facebook said: The number of fake accounts used daily can be very high as Ensar Sahinturk used more than 9000 accounts on April 22, 2020 to automatically send requests to Facebook's server.
The cloned sites network also allows visitors to download features posted directly through Instagram and post photos and videos via Instagram.
In 2019, Facebook tried to protect its platform from counterfeiting by disabling the nearly 30,000 fake Instagram accounts managed by Ensar Sahinturk.
Facebook claims it spent more than $ 25,000 on an investigation resolving issues related to the defendant's business and applied for damages for investigation during the trial.
The lawsuit is one of several lawsuits filed by Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which data were collected from millions of platform users without permission.
Facebook has since taken legal action asking analytics companies to misuse their data, and the developer has violated the terms of sale for the counterfeit items.