Fearing repetition of scandal with Cambridge Analytica, Facebook sued Korean company Rankwave

Obviously, Facebook tries to avoid repeating of scandal with Cambridge Analytica, when social network was extensively critiqued for unsanctioned usage of users’ data.

Recently is became known that Zukerberg’s corporation sued South Korean analytical company Rankwave. The essence of the claim is misuse of users’ data.

As Facebook lawyers say, Rankwave representatives abused with platform’s for developers data and refused to delete data upon request.

Rankwave activity turned around help in business promotion – company proposed to inbuilt in applications possibility of authorization with Facebook, that allowed taking users’ data for processing. Later Rankwave studies users’ behavioral features and assisted business in organizing maximally targeting advertising campaigns.

According to Facebook’s statement of claim, Rankwave misused data, collected with their application. Rankwave’s application collected information about Facebook user’s activity, majorly about geolocation. For example, if a person visited baseball stadium, later he will receive advertisement on sales of tickets on baseball matches.

TechCrunch journalists investigated, that Rankwave still promotes application for Android, that enables entering system via Facebook, so it can assess how popular are your posts and give you “points of social impact”.

“The use of a seemingly fun app to slurp up user data and repurpose it for other business goals is strikingly similar to how Cambridge Analytica’s personality quiz app tempted millions of users to provide data about themselves and their friends”, — noted Techcrunch journalists.

As supposed, Facebook data cannot be used for other business purposes, developer can only improve user’s interface of his application.

“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”, – Facebook’s director of platform enforcement and litigation Jessica Romero wrote.

Established in 2012 Sungwha Shim, Rankwave got into Facebook crossroads in June 2018, after it was sold to Korean entertainment company in May 2017. Facebook assessed cost of its data at the time of buyout in $9,8 million.

Source: https://techcrunch.com