Facebook sues marketing company over ‘improperly’ harvested user data

Facebook sued a marketing company Thursday, alleging in federal court that the firm “improperly” collected data from users of the social media platform.

The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District Court of California, claimed oneAudience paid developers to use a malicious software development kit, or SDK, in their apps.

SDKs are tools that let developers make apps more quickly.

OneAudience’s SDK collected data in an improper fashion from Facebook users who opted to log in to certain apps, the lawsuit alleged.

Facebook claimed the data included names, email addresses and gender, in limited cases.

Facebook said it sent a cease-and-desist letter to oneAudience in November, but claimed the company did not cooperate with a requested audit.

OneAudience did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a blog post, Jessica Romero, Facebook’s director of platform enforcement and litigation, wrote that the lawsuit was filed to protect the platform’s users.

“This is the latest in our efforts to protect people and increase accountability of those who abuse the technology industry and users,” she wrote. “Through these lawsuits, we will continue sending a message to people trying to abuse our services that Facebook is serious about enforcing our policies.”

Facebook has been under pressure to do more to secure user data ever since the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal, which compromised the information of millions of users.