Facebook has filed a lawsuit against a South Korean data marketing company which it says violated its policies.
The social network said that Rankwave, based in Seoul, had failed to comply with an investigation into its practices and that its access to Facebook users’ data had been suspended.
It is thought to be the first lawsuit of its kind since Facebook imposed new restrictions on how third party companies could access its users’ data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The company gave no further details about Rankwave’s alleged misbehaviour, raising the possibility that the lawsuit could expose an improper data-harvesting operation similar to Cambridge Analytica’s.
<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content=""Facebook was investigating Rankwave’s data practices in relation to its advertising and marketing services," said Jessica Romero, Facebook's director of platform enforcement and litigation, in a blog post published late on Friday night. "Rankwave failed to cooperate with our efforts to verify their compliance.” data-reactid=”21″>”Facebook was investigating Rankwave’s data practices in relation to its advertising and marketing services,” said Jessica Romero, Facebook’s director of platform enforcement and litigation, in a blog post published late on Friday night. “Rankwave failed to cooperate with our efforts to verify their compliance.
“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.”
She said the company had already suspended “apps and accounts” associated with Rankwave, though it is not clear exactly what those were.
Rankwave is a marketing company that sells “customer management solutions” based on its self-described ability to sift and analyse information from millions of social media users.
It is unclear how exactly it accesses that data, or whether it has permission to analyse it on behalf of its clients, but its website proclaims that it has data from 9m users, to whom it has asigned 647m separate “interests”.
“Rankwave has already figured out what type of person your customers are and what they are interested in,” the company claims. “We want to create a world where the necessary information is communicated to the people who need it.
“In order for a newborn discount coupon to be mailed to a novice mom who needs discount information… the company must understand the customer’s situation deeply.”
Existing customer management solutions, it says, depend on information that clients already possess, such as information from the services they offer. But Rankwave’s solution susses out users’ real “activities and opinions” to understand their “actual situation”.
It gives the example of a campaign in which it looked at social media users who had liked the fan pages for the Doosan Bears and the Lotte Giants, two South Korean baseball teams, in order to determine whether they lived in Seoul, the country’s capital.
One of its patents describes a method “receiving information of a particular user from a number of applications” on their phone, while another talks about analysing connections between a “second user” using “data uploaded by a first user”. Facebook asks all companies who use its service to go through a “rigorous app review process” asking them to verify the existence and nature of their businesses and to sign a contract restricting their use of Facebook users’ data. But some reports have raised questions about how closely Facebook monitors such companies.
Rankwave has not yet responded to a request for comment. Facebook has not yet responded to a request for more information.
<p class="canvas-atom canvas-text Mb(1.0em) Mb(0)–sm Mt(0.8em)–sm" type="text" content="This story is developing. Stand by for more details…” data-reactid=”32″>This story is developing. Stand by for more details…
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