A tech company that claims to have the ability to use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict crime by analyzing social media data is facing a legal battle with Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. Meta accuses the company, Voyager Labs, of creating thousands of fake accounts on its platforms to harvest personal information from users and use it for its predictive analytics. Voyager Labs denies any wrongdoing and says it is providing a valuable service to law enforcement agencies around the world.
Voyager Labs: A world leader in AI-based investigations
Voyager Labs is a tech company that specializes in AI-based investigation solutions. According to its website, it empowers organizations worldwide to gain deep investigative insights about entities, individuals, groups, and topics. It says it can comb through mounds of information from all corners of the internet, including social media and the dark web, to provide insight, uncover potential risks and predict future crimes.
The company boasts that it has developed a proprietary AI platform that can understand human behavior, context and intent from unstructured data. It claims that its platform can reveal hidden connections, patterns and networks among people, places and events. It also says that it can generate actionable insights and recommendations for decision makers in various domains, such as law enforcement, national security, corporate security and financial crime.
Voyager Labs says that it works with some of the world’s leading law enforcement agencies, such as the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), as well as other government and private sector clients. It says that it helps them prevent victimization, apprehend offenders, disrupt criminal networks, protect public safety and enhance operational efficiency.
Meta: Voyager Labs violated its terms of service and privacy policies
Meta, on the other hand, alleges that Voyager Labs has been violating its terms of service and privacy policies by creating fake accounts on its platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, to collect personal data from users without their consent. Meta says that Voyager Labs used these accounts to access public and private posts, comments, likes, reactions, photos, videos and other information from users. Meta also says that Voyager Labs used automated tools and scripts to scrape data from its platforms at a large scale.
Meta claims that Voyager Labs used this data to build profiles of users and their social networks, and to infer their behavior patterns, interests, preferences, opinions and activities. Meta says that Voyager Labs used this data for its predictive analytics services, which could potentially affect users’ rights, freedoms and reputations. Meta also says that Voyager Labs did not disclose its identity or purpose to users or obtain their consent for collecting and processing their data.
Meta filed a federal lawsuit against Voyager Labs on Jan. 12, 2023, seeking to ban it from accessing its platforms and to delete all the data it obtained from them. Meta also seeks damages for breach of contract, trespassing, fraud and unfair competition. Meta says that Voyager Labs created at least 55,000 fake accounts on its platforms since 2016, including 17,000 after Meta revoked its access following the lawsuit.
The debate: Privacy vs security
The lawsuit between Meta and Voyager Labs raises a debate about the trade-off between privacy and security in the age of AI and big data. On one hand, some argue that using social media data for predictive analytics can help prevent crimes, protect public safety and enhance national security. On the other hand, some argue that collecting and analyzing social media data without users’ consent or knowledge can violate their privacy rights, expose them to discrimination or manipulation, and undermine their trust in online platforms.
The lawsuit also highlights the challenges of regulating the use of AI and big data by private companies that provide services to government agencies or other clients. Some questions that arise are: Who owns the data collected from social media platforms? How transparent are the methods and algorithms used for predictive analytics? How accurate are the predictions and how are they validated? How are the potential biases and errors in the predictions addressed? How are the ethical and legal implications of using predictive analytics considered?
The outcome of the lawsuit between Meta and Voyager Labs could have significant implications for the future of AI-based investigation solutions and their impact on society.
