Facebook sues analytics firm Rankwave over alleged data misuse
Facebook might have another Cambridge Analytica on its hands.
In a late Friday news dump, Facebook revealed that it filed a lawsuit alleging South Korean analytics firm Rankwave abused its developer platform’s data, and has refused to cooperate with a mandatory compliance audit and request to delete the data, techcrunch.com reported.
Jessica Romero, Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation, said: ‘Today Facebook filed a lawsuit in California state court against Rankwave, a South Korean data analytics company that ran apps on the Facebook platform. Facebook was investigating Rankwave’s data practices in relation to its advertising and marketing services. Rankwave failed to cooperate with our efforts to verify their compliance with our policies, which we require of all developers using our platform.’
‘Facebook has already suspended apps and accounts associated with Rankwave, and today’s suit asks the court to enforce the basic cooperation terms that Rankwave agreed to in exchange for the opportunity to operate apps on the platform.
‘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.’
For now there is no evidence of wholesale transfer of Rankwave’s data to other parties or its misuse for especially nefarious purposes like influencing an election as with Cambridge Analytica, techcrunch.com reported. The lawsuit merely alleges data was wrongly harnessed to make money, which may not spur the same level of backlash. But the case further proves that Facebook was too busy growing itself thanks to the platform to properly safeguard it against abuse.