Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc is calling out half a dozen private surveillance companies for hacking or other abuses, accusing them in a report published Thursday of collectively targeting about 50,000 people across its platforms.
Platforms Inc is calling out half a dozen private surveillance companies for hacking or other abuses, accusing them in a report published Thursday of collectively targeting about 50,000 people across its platforms. The company’s fight with the comes amid a wider move by American tech companies, U.S. lawmakers and President Joe Biden’s administration against purveyors of digital espionage services, notably the Israeli spyware company, which was blacklisted earlier this month following weeks of revelations about how its technology was being deployed against civil society. Meta is already suing NSO in a U.S. court. Nathaniel Gleicher, Meta’s head of security policy, told Reuters that Thursday’s crackdown was meant to signal that “the surveillance-for-hire industry is much broader than one company.” Meta’s report said it was suspending roughly 1,500, mostly fake accounts run by seven organizations across Facebook, Instagram and. Meta said the entities targeted people in more than 100 countries. Meta did not provide a detailed explanation of how it identified the surveillance firms, but it operates some of the world’s biggest social and communications networks and regularly touts its ability to find and remove malicious actors from its platforms. Among them is Israel’s Black Cube, which became notorious for deploying its spies on behalf of Hollywood rapist Harvey Weinstein.
