• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, December 5, 2024

The U.K.-based company Voyager Labs -- which provides analytics services to law enforcement agencies -- has settled a lawsuit brought by Meta Platforms by agreeing to refrain from scraping Facebook and Instagram.

The settlement, approved Friday by U.S. District Court Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in the Northern District of California, also requires Voyager Labs to permanently delete any data collected from Meta.

The deal brings an end to a battle dating to January 2023, when Meta alleged that Voyager Labs created 38,000 Facebook accounts, then used those accounts to scrape data from more than 600,000 social media users. Meta claimed in its lawsuit that Voyager violated federal and California anti-hacking laws, and that Voyager broke its contract with Meta by failing to follow its terms of service, which prohibit scraping.

Voyager urged Martinez-Olguin to throw out the case for several reasons. Among other arguments, Voyager said Meta's allegations regarding a violation of its terms of service were vague, and that the complaint conflated Voyager Labs (also called Voyager UK) with its subsidiaries -- Voyager Analytics (based in Delaware), Novarize (based in Delaware) and Bionic 8 Analytics Inc. (based in Israel).

“Meta's theory of contract formation appears to be: there are billions of users of Meta's Facebook and Instagram websites, and Voyager UK allegedly was one of them; therefore, some contract must have been formed between Meta and Voyager UK,” the company argued in a written motion.

Voyager also said California courts lacked jurisdiction to decide whether it violated federal or state anti-hacking laws.

Martinez-Olguin rejected those arguments in May, paving the way for the lawsuit to move forward.

Meta has sued other companies for allegedly violating its terms of service by scraping data, including analytics business BrandTotal. The companies settled that matter in 2022.