Facebook filed a lawsuit today against two companies for creating and distributing malicious program extensions tours that obtained data from users without authorization from Facebook and Instagram sites.
The lawsuit was filed against the companies BrandTotal Ltd., a company based in Israel and Unimania Inc., from Delaware.
The two companies are behind UpVoice and Ads Feed, two extensions of Chrome that were available from the official Chrome Web Store from September to November 2019. During that time, they garnered more than 5.000 and 10.000 installs, respectively.
“BrandTotal attracts users to install it extension UpVoice from the Google Chrome Store by offering payments in exchange for installations, in the form of online gift cards, and claiming that users who installed the extension can influence the marketing decisions and strategies of multi-billion dollar name-brand companies,” Facebook says in the lawsuit. documents filed today.
"Similarly, Ads Feed promoted the extension in the Google Chrome Store by claiming that users were becoming members of an elite teams that influences the advertising decisions of multi-billion dollar companies!”
However, Facebook claims that, despite their descriptions, both extensions are malicious and were designed to collect public and private data from users' online accounts.
According to documents, Facebook claims that the UpVoice extension collects data from users' profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube.
Similarly, Unimania collects data from users on Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Twitter and YouTube.
Data typically includes user profile information (name, user ID, gender, date of birth, relationship status, and location information), ads, and ad metrics (ad name, ad image and text, and metrics and user interaction metrics), and User Ad Preferences (Ad Interest Information).
According to Facebook, the data obtained illegally through the two extensions were sold to a marketing company through BrandTotal.
Facebook says both extensions use almost identical code and believes the two companies are the same.
"The defendants shared common employees," Facebook said in a statement.
“For example, the Chief Product Officer and General Manager of BrandTotal (Ex. 5), created Facebook accounts in the name of Unimania and Ads Feed and the Chief Technology Officer of BrandTotal and cofounder (Ex. 5) also managed Unimania Facebook accounts”
Both extensions are still available for download.