Facebook is suing two European developers for allegedly violating its terms of service by scraping user data.
Legal action has been filed in Portugal by Facebook and Facebook Ireland against two individuals working for application/extension development company Oink and Stuff.
The firm claims its software products, available for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera and Android, have over one million active users.
However, the two misled users into downloading their Chrome extensions by claiming in a privacy policy that they did not collect any personal information, alleged Facebook director of platform enforcement and litigation, Jessica Romero.
She highlighted four extensions, Web for Instagram plus DM, Blue Messenger, Emoji keyboard and Green Messenger, that contained code which Facebook claims are malicious and effectively act like spyware.
Image: Kon Karampelas
Facebook filed a lawsuit today in Portugal against two Portuguese nationals for developing browser extensions that scraped user data from Facebook sites. When people installed these extensions on their browsers, they were installing concealed code designed to scrape their information from the Facebook website, but also information from the users browsers unrelated to Facebook all without their knowledge, Jessica Romero, Facebook s Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation, said today. If the user visited the Facebook website, the browser extensions were programmed to scrape their name, user ID, gender, relationship status, age group and other information related to their account, Romero said.