Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Facebook on Thursday sued OneAudience, a mobile data analytics company, for collecting data from its users beginning in September 2019.
Details: Facebook alleges that OneAudience plugged software development kits (SDK) — designed to scrape user data from its site as well as Google and Twitter — into shopping and gaming apps distributed through stores like Google Play.
How it works: People would have their data collected after downloading an app and logging into it through their Google, Facebook or Twitter account, Facebook claims in the lawsuit.
The company says that users' names, email addresses, time zones, the country in which the account is used, user ID (a string of numbers that links someone to their profile) and in some cases, gender, were collected by OneAudience.
- Gender was not obtained by OneAudience unless the user authorized an app to know it.
- Instagram was not affected, Facebook spokesperson Jason Grosse told Axios.
- OneAudience said that the data it collected was "deleted on a regular basis from OneAudience's data systems," per Facebook's lawsuit.
What they're saying: "This is the latest in our efforts to protect people and increase accountability of those who abuse the technology industry and users," Jessica Romero, Facebook's director of platform enforcement and litigation, wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
- OneAudience did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In November, the company said it shut down the OneAudience SDK, stating that personal information was "never intended to be collected, never added to our database and never used."
- Twitter users' emails, usernames and last Tweets were reportedly affected by OneAudience scraping, the company wrote in a November blog post. Twitter said it had evidence of Android users being affected, but not iOS users.
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