As smart as they are known to be, human beings just cannot keep themselves from making mistakes. This has been proven time and time again throughout our history, with each appearance forcing us to look for some sort of a defensive cover. We will, on our part, find the stated cover once we bring dedicated regulatory bodies into the fold. Having a well-defined authority within each and every area across the spectrum was an absolute game-changer, as it instantly compensated for a lot of our shortcomings. However, the utopia to emerge here was notably short-lived, and if we are being honest, it was all because of technology. You see, as soon as technology and its layered nature took over the scene, it gave people an unprecedented shot at exploiting others’ missteps. Such a vulnerable dynamic, like you can guess, would overwhelm our regulatory bodies, thus sending us back to square one. Nevertheless, the picture will undergo another shift soon, and this one will see our governing forces becoming more and more knowledgeable about how to regulate technology. In fact, two recent lawsuits do everything to give you a lowdown on the stated new phase of governance and what we can expect from it moving forward.
Meta has officially filed separate lawsuits against two prolific data scrapers, who allegedly compromised thousands of Instagram profiles. According to certain reports, one of the lawsuits is all about Octopus, the US subsidiary of a Chinese multinational data-scraping firm, and its special software that compromises your account by picking up the highly-critical authentication information. This enables the software to then collect more bits of critical data like phone numbers, dates of birth and various other personal details. By doing so, Meta claims it brazenly violates the platform’s terms of service and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, therefore warranting a full-fledged lawsuit.
“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,” Meta said in a statement. “This industry makes scraping available to individuals and companies that otherwise would not have the capabilities.”
Apart from Octopus, Meta also filed a formal complaint against Ekrem Ateş, who, as per the company’s claims, unscrupulously collected information of Instagram users and published it on clone sites for everyone to access. Interestingly, this isn’t Meta’s first reinforcement action against Ateş. The social media giant has already sent him a cease and desist letter, while also revoking his access to its services.
