Facebook has deleted nearly 70 accounts, profiles and applications of the Russian company Social Data Hub which the social-media platform suspects of unauthorized collection of users’ personal data.
“We have removed over 66 accounts, profiles, pages and applications of Social Data Hub from our services and expect to be able to find and remove yet more accounts,” Facebook said in a commentary in response to a query from Interfax on October 11.
The pages of the “the Russia-linked company working with social media” were removed “as part of the effort to ensure safety measures on the platform,” Facebook said.
“The removal of pages is caused by the fact that the company engaged in user data scraping, which is a breach of our user agreement,” Facebook said.
Earlier the removal of the personal pages of 30 employees from two Russian companies, Social Data Hub and Fubutech, was revealed to Inc. by the founder of both projects, Artur Khachuyan. He said that Facebook wrote to the Ireland-registered Social Data Hub, accusing the company of gathering and selling Facebook and Instagram users’ data, the Inc. wrote. For its part, Social Data Hub has already replied to Facebook, explaining that it develops data analysis software and sells it to clients, including governments. “We do not give away anyone’s personal data and what they do with our software is their business,” Khachuyan said, according to Inc.
According to its website, SocialDataHub is “a multidisciplinary company specializing in artificial intelligence systems development. Our main product is the platform of the intellectual analysis of the information field including collection, processing, data analytics, image recognition and reports creating automatically. Our service covers all open sources, forums, blogs, radio and TV, mass media and all the open Internet. We won’t miss any information, any newspaper article, any comment on Facebook, any post on Instagram.
“Metrics, indexes and algorithms of the SocialDataHub are Russian development, every data-centers based in Russia, its founders are citizens of the Russian Federation.”
