A new report has confirmed that Facebook is suing a South Korean firm for unlawfully using it’s data to sell marketing and advertising.
The social media platform is now asking a judge to force the firm, ‘Rankwave’, to allow it to audit the activities of the firm so as to see if user data was obtained and potentially sold. Facebook added that this would “send a message to developers that Facebook is serious about enforcing our policies. Facebook was investigating Rankwave’s data practices in relation 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.”
Court documents filed in California on Friday shows that Facebook is of the belief that Rankwave used at least 30 different apps to “track and analyse” likes and even comment on Facebook pages.
Rankwave owns a consumer app which after gaining the user’s consent, tracks the popularity of that user’s posts. According to Facebook, the app calculates “social influence score.”
Facebook stated that it had information that since 2014, Rankwave had continued to use the data gathered by its apps “for its own business purposes, which include providing consulting services to advertisers and marketing companies”.
