Facebook
is suing a South Korean firm it accuses of unlawfully using information to sell marketing and advertising.
The social network is asking a judge to force Rankwave to allow it to audit the firm’s
activities to see if
user information was
obtained and potentially sold.
A source at
Facebook told the BBC it was as yet unable to say how much information or how many users may be affected.
The network said the move would “send a message to developers that
Facebook is serious regarding enforcing our policies”.
“Facebook was investigating Rankwave’s information practices in regard to its advertising and marketing services,” said Jessica Romero, Facebook’s director of platform enforcement.
“Rankwave failed to co-operate with our efforts to verify their
compliance with our policies, which we require of all developers using our platform.”
The BBC was unable to reach Rankwave for comment on Friday.
Tracking users’ posts.
According to court documents filed in California on Friday, Facebook is accusing Rankwave of using at least 30 totally different apps
to “track and analyze” comments and likes on Facebook pages.
Rankwave additionally had a consumer app that, after gaining the user’s consent, would track the popularity of that user’s
posts. The app would calculate a “social influence score”,
Facebook said.
However, the social network said it had information that since 2014,
Rankwave had been using data gathered by its apps
“for its own business purposes, which include providing consulting services to advertisers
and promoting companies”.
In its lawsuit, Facebook accuses Rankwave of ignoring repeated requests to open itself
up to an audit and provide proof relating to information it had allegedly
obtained.
Facebook wants a judge to
force Rankwave to take those
steps, as well as
pay an unspecified amount in damages. Facebook said the data company had injured its “reputation” and “public
trust”.
Facebook said it began investigating Rankwave, which has remained active on the
network until last
month, in June2018.
‘We need new web rules’
The case will most likely draw
comparisons with Cambridge Analytica, the UK-based data analytics firm that abused private Facebook data in order to inform political campaigning efforts. The discovery of that incident
plunged Facebook into a crisis.
On Friday, Facebook co-founder and ceo Mark
Zuckerberg met French President Emmanuel macron in Paris to
discuss potential regulation of social networks.
“We need new rules for the internet that
will spell out the responsibilities of corporations and
those of governments,” MrZuckerberg told French tv channel France 2 after the
meeting.
However, he didn’t address calls from fellow Facebook co-founder Chris
Hughes that the corporate was
too powerful and should be broken up.