
Last year, Facebook revealed that its data was misused by an analytics firm named Cambridge Analytica. This data was then used to target audience for the US elections. This caused a huge backlash against Facebook in the US. Now, a new issue similar to Cambridge Analytica has been revealed by Facebook.
The company has informed that they filed a lawsuit against South Korean analytics firm named Rankwave. The reason behind the lawsuit is that Rankwave has allegedly misused the Facebook developer platform’s data.
On top of that, Facebook claims that Rankwave refuses to cooperate with the mandatory compliance audit and its request to delete the data. In its lawsuit, Facebook says that Rankwave is offering to help businesses build a Facebook authorization step in their apps which allows them to pass user data to Rankwave.
This data can be used to analyze the biographical and behavioral patterns of users to get user contact info as well as ad targeting for businesses. Along with that, Facebook also claims Rankwave misused data from an app which lets you check your social media “influencer score”.
Data such as location check-ins was found out from that app and Rankwave could supply that data to see if a user has checked-in to a baseball stadium. After that, clients would target users based on getting offers for baseball tickets. This is very similar to Cambridge Analytica which also gathered user data from a personality quiz app.
Facebook, in its lawsuit, also says that Rankwave also delayed the cease-and-desist order purposefully. Also, Ranwave lied about not using its apps since 2018 whereas they last used those apps in April 2019 according to Facebook.
Facebook’s platform enforcement director says that “By filing the lawsuit, we are sending a message to developers that Facebook is serious about enforcing our policies, including requiring developers to cooperate with us during an investigation”