Facebook announced last week it deleted 66 accounts, pages, and apps tied to two Russian companies allegedly using Facebook data to build facial recognition software for the Russian government.
Facebook said Thursday that it had removed any accounts associated with SocialDataHub and its sister firm, Fubutech, because the companies violated its policies by scraping data from the social network.
“Facebook has reason to believe your work for the government has included matching photos from individuals’ personal social media accounts in order to identify them,” the company said in a cease-and-desist letter to SocialDataHub that was dated Tuesday and viewed by The New York Times.
Facebook gave the companies until Friday to detail what data they had taken and then delete it all.
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Artur Khachuyan, the 26-year-old chief executive of SocialDataHub and Fubutech, said in an interview Friday that Facebook had deleted his companies’ accounts unfairly.
Fubutech does build facial-recognition software for the Russian government and uses Facebook data, but it scrapes Google search results for that information — not Facebook, he said. And SocialDataHub’s main product — a system that assigns scores to Russian citizens based on their social-media profiles for insurers and banks — required permission from the users it rates, he said.
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Facebook’s removal of SocialDataHub and Fubutech reflects a larger problem for the social media company as it evaluates its relationship with third-party apps that have access to people’s Facebook data.
In the wake of reporting by The New York Times and others that the political firm Cambridge Analytica harvested the data of more than 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app, Facebook announced that it was reviewing its data-sharing policy with apps. After an audit, the company said it was suspending 200 apps. Some have since had their access to Facebook restored.
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Mr. Khachuyan said the letter from Facebook had surprised him, particularly because his companies have been operating the same way for years.
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He said Fubutech scraped data from the web, particularly Google search and the Russian search engine Yandex, to build a database of Russian citizens and their images that the government can use for facial recognition. “We don’t know exactly what they do with it,” he said.
“Maybe government clients connect our software to C.C. cameras,” Mr. Khachuyan said, referring to closed-circuit cameras. “Maybe they connect it to social profiles.”
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He said his companies, which share 52 employees in Moscow, complied with Facebook policies; they use Facebook data only when it is public and available on Google search, or if the user has granted them permission. He said the techniques were also legal in Russia.
“It’s a trick in our federal law to use that data, but that works only with Russian citizens,” Mr. Khachuyan said.
At the top of the SocialDataHub’s website, there is a single line: “We know everything about everybody.”
Facebook Says Russian Firms ‘Scraped’ Data, Some for Facial Recognition (NYT)